A Historical Sketch of Sociological Theory: The Early Years Chapter 1 Chapter Summary

Classical sociological theories are theories of great scope and ambition that either were created in Europe between the early 1800s and the early 1900s or have their roots in the culture of that period. The work of such classical sociological theorists as Auguste Comte,Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, andVilfredo Pareto was important in its time and played a central role in the subsequent development of sociology. Additionally, the ideas of these theorists continue to be relevant to sociological theory today, because contemporary sociologists read them. They have become classics because they have a wide range of application and deal with centrally important social issues.

This chapter supplies the context within which the works of the theorists presented in detail in later chapters can be understood. It also offers a sense of the historical forces that gave shape to sociological theory and their later impact. While it is difficult to say with precision when sociological theory began, we begin to find thinkers who can clearly

be identified as sociologists by the early 1800s.

Social Forces in the Development of Sociological Theory

The social conditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were of the utmost significance to the development of sociology.

The chaos and social disorder that resulted from the series of political revolutions ushered in by the French Revolution in 1789 disturbed many early social theorists. While they recognized that a return to the old order was impossible, they sought to find new sources of order in societies that had been traumatized by dramatic political changes.

The Industrial Revolution was a set of developments that transformed Western societies from largely agricultural to overwhelmingly industrial systems. Peasants left agricultural work for industrial occupations in factories. Within this new system, a few profited greatly while the majority worked long hours for low wages. A reaction against the industrial system and capitalism led to the labor movement and other radical movements dedicated to overthrowing the capitalist system. As a result of the Industrial Revolution, large numbers of people moved to urban settings. The expansion

of cities produced a long list of urban problems that attracted the attention of early sociologists.

Socialism emerged as an alternative vision of a worker's paradise in which wealth was equitably distributed. Karl Marx was highly critical of capitalist society in his writings and engaged in political activities to help engineer its fall. Other early theorists recognized the problems of capitalist society but sought change through reform

because they feared socialism more than they feared capitalism.

Feminists were especially active during the French and American Revolutions, during the abolitionist movements and political rights mobilizations of the mid-nineteenth century, and especially during the Progressive Era in the United States. But feminist concerns filtered into early sociology only on the margins. In spite of their marginal status, early women sociologists like Harriet Martineau and Marianne Weber wrote a significant body of theory that is being rediscovered today.

All of these changes had a profound effect on religiosity. Many sociologists came from religious backgrounds and sought to understand the place of religion and morality in modern society.

Throughout this period, the technological products of science were permeating every sector of life, and science was acquiring enormous prestige. An ongoing debate developed between sociologists who sought to model their discipline after the hard sciences and those who thought the distinctive characteristics of social life made a

scientific sociology problematic and unwise.

Intellectual Forces and the Rise of Sociological Theory

The Enlightenment was a period of intellectual development and change in philosophical thought beginning in the eighteenth century. Enlightenment thinkers sought to combine reason with empirical research on the model of Newtonian science. They tried to

produce highly systematic bodies of thought that made rational sense and that could be derived from real-world observation. Convinced that the world could be comprehended and controlled using reason and research, they believed traditional social values and institutions to be irrational and inhibitive of human development. Their ideas conflicted with traditional religious bodies like the Catholic Church, the political regimes of Europe's absolutist monarchies, and the social system of feudalism. They placed their faith instead in the power of the individual's capacity to reason. Early sociology also maintained a faith in empiricism and rational inquiry.

A conservative reaction to the Enlightenment, characterized by a strong anti-modern sentiment, also influenced early theorists. The conservative reaction led thinkers to emphasize that society had an existence of its own, in contrast to the individualism of the Enlightenment. Additionally, they had a cautious approach to social change and a tendency to see modern developments like industrialization, urbanization, and bureaucratization as having disorganizing effects.

The Development of French Sociology

Claude Henri Saint-Simon (1760-1825) was a positivist who believed that the study of social phenomena should employ the same scientific techniques as the natural

sciences. But he also saw the need for socialist reforms, especially centralized planning of the economic system.

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) coined the term "sociology." Like Saint-Simon, he believed the study of social phenomena should employ scientific techniques. But Comte was disturbed by the chaos of French society and was critical of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Comte developed an evolutionary theory of social change in his

law of the three stages. He argued that social disorder was caused by ideas left over from the idea systems of earlier stages. Only when a scientific footing for the governing of society was established would the social upheavals of his time cease. Comte also stressed the systematic character of society and accorded great importance to the role

of consensus. These beliefs made Comte a forerunner of positivism and reformism in classical sociological theory.

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) legitimized sociology in France and became a dominant force in the development of the discipline worldwide. Although he was politically liberal, he took a more conservative position intellectually, arguing that the social disorders produced by striking social changes could be reduced through social

reform. Durkheim argued that sociology was the study of structures that are external to, and coercive over, the individual; for example, legal codes and shared moral beliefs, which he called social facts. In Suicide he made his case for the importance of sociology by demonstrating that social facts could cause individual behavior. He argued that societies were held together by a strongly held collective morality called the collective conscience. Because of the complexity of modern societies, the collective conscience had become weaker, resulting in a variety of social pathologies. In his later work, Dukheim turned to the religion of primitive societies to demonstrate the importance of the collective consciousness.

The Development of German Sociology

German sociology is rooted in the philosopher G.F.W. Hegel's (1770-1831) idea of the dialectic. Like Comte in France, Hegel offered an evolutionary theory of society. The dialectic is a view that the world is made up not of static structures but of processes, relationships, conflicts, and contradictions. He emphasized the importance of changes in consciousness for producing dialectical change. Dialectical thinking is a dynamic way of thinking about the world.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) followed Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) in criticizing

Hegel for favoring abstract ideas over real people. Marx adopted a materialist orientation that focused on real material entities like wealth and the state. He argued that the problems of modern society could be traced to real material sources like the structures of capitalism. Yet he maintained Hegel's emphasis on the dialectic, forging a position called dialectical materialism that held that material processes, relationships, conflicts, and contradictions are responsible for social problems and social change.

Marx's materialism led him to posit a labor theory of value, in which he argued that the capitalist's profits were based on the exploitation of the laborer. Under the influence of British political economists, Marx grew to deplore the exploitation of workers and the horrors of the capitalist system. Unlike the political economists, his view was that such problems were the products of an endemic conflict that could be addressed only through radical change. While Marx did not consider himself to be a sociologist, his influence has been strong in Europe. Until recently, American sociologists dismissed Marx as an ideologist.

The theories of Max Weber (1864-1920) can be seen as the fruit of a long debate with the ghost of Marx. While Weber was not familiar with Marx's writings, he viewed the Marxists of his day as economic determinists who offered single-cause theories of social life. Rather than seeing ideas as simple reflections of economic factors, Weber

saw them as autonomous forces capable of profoundly affecting the economic world.

Weber can also be understood as trying to round out Marx's theoretical perspective; rather than denying the effect of material structures, he was simply pointing out the importance of ideas as well.

Whereas Marx offered a theory of capitalism, Weber's work was fundamentally a theory of the process of rationalization. Rationalization is the process whereby universally applied rules, regulations, and laws come to dominate more and more sectors of society on the model of a bureaucracy. Weber argued that in the Western world rational-legal systems of authority squeezed out traditional authority systems, rooted in beliefs, and charismatic authority, systems based on the extraordinary qualities of a leader. His historical studies of religion are dedicated to showing why rational-legal

forms took hold in the West but not elsewhere. Weber's reformist views and academic style were better received than Marx's radicalism in sociology. Sociologists also appreciated Weber's well-rounded approach to the social world.

Georg Simmel (1858-1918) was Weber's contemporary and co-founder of the German Sociological Society. While Marx and Weber were pre-occupied with large-scale issues, Simmel was best known for his work on smaller-scale issues, especially

individual action and interaction. He became famous for his thinking on forms of interaction (i.e., conflict) and types of interacts (i.e., the stranger). Simmel saw that understanding interaction among people was one of the major tasks of sociology. His short essays on interesting topics made his work accessible to American sociologists. His most famous long work, The Philosophy of Money, was concerned with the emergence of a money economy in the modern world. This work observed that large-

scale social structures like the money economy can become separate from individuals and come to dominate them.

The Origins of British Sociology

British sociology was shaped in the nineteenth century by three conflicting sources: political economy, ameliorism, and social evolution.

British sociologists saw the market economy as a positive force, a source of order, harmony, and integration in society. The task of the sociologist was not to criticize society but to gather data on the laws by which it operated. The goal was to provide the government with the facts it needed to understand the way the system worked and direct its workings wisely. By the mid-nineteenth century this belief manifested itself in the tendency to aggregate individually reported statistical data to form a collective

portrait of British society. Statistical data soon pointed British sociologists toward some of the failings of a market economy, notably poverty, but left them without adequate theories of society to explain them.

Ameliorism is the desire to solve social problems by reforming individuals. Because the British sociologists could not trace the source of problems such as poverty to the society as a whole, then the source had to lie within individuals themselves.

A number of British thinkers were attracted to the evolutionary theories of Auguste Comte. Most prominent among these was Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who believed that society was growing progressively better and therefore should be left alone. He adopted the view that social institutions adapted progressively and positively to their social environments. He also accepted the Darwinian view that natural selection occurred in the social world. Among Spencer's more outrageous ideas was the

argument that unfit societies should be permitted to die off, allowing for the adaptive upgrading of the world as a whole. Clearly, such ideas did not sit well with the reformism of the ameliorists.

Other Developments

Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) thought that human instincts were such a strong force that Marx's hope to achieve dramatic social changes with an economic revolution was impossible. Pareto offered an elite theory of social change that held that a small elite inevitably dominates society on the basis of enlightened self-interest. Change occurs when one group of elites begins to degenerate and is replaced by another. Pareto's lasting contribution to sociology has been a vision of society as a system in equilibrium, a whole consisting of balanced independent parts.

After his death, Marx's disciples became more rigid in their belief that he had uncovered the economic laws that ruled the capitalist world. Seeing the demise of capitalism as inevitable, political action seemed unnecessary. By the 1920's, however,

Hegelian Marxists refused to reduce Marxism to a scientific theory that ignored individual thought and action. Seeking to integrate Hegel's interest in consciousness with the materialist interest in economic structures, the Hegelian Marxists emphasized the importance of individual action in bringing about a social revolution and reemphasized the relationship between thought and action.

The Contemporary Relevance of Classical Sociological Theory

Classical sociological theories are important not only historically, but also because they are living documents with contemporary relevance to both modern theorists and today's social world. The work of classical thinkers continues to inspire modern sociologists in a variety of ways. Many contemporary thinkers seek to reinterpret the classics to apply them to the contemporary scene.

Karl Marx Chapter 2 Chapter Summary

Introduction

There are a variety of interpretations of Karl Marx's (1818 - 1883) theory of

capitalism. This arises from both its unfinished nature and Marx's shifting points of emphasis across his lifetime. The focus of Marx's work, however, was undoubtedly on the historical basis of inequality, and specifically inequality under capitalism. Marx's critiques of the capitalist system - its tendency towards crises, the necessity of inequality - are still relevant today.

The Dialectic

Marx's powerful critique has as it basis a unique approach to reality - the dialectic. Taking from G.W.F. Hegel (1770 - 1831), Marx believed that any study of reality must be attuned to the contradictions within society and, indeed, he sees contradiction as the motor of historical change. Unlike Hegel, Marx believed that these contradictions existed not simply in our minds (i.e., in the way we understand the world), but that they had a concrete material existence. At the heart of capitalism was the contradiction between the demands of the capitalist to earn a profit and the demands of the worker, who wants to retain some profit to subsist. Over time, the workings of the capitalist system would exacerbate this contradiction, and its resolution can be had only through social change.

The Dialectical Method

The dialectical approach does not recognize the division between social values and social facts. To do so leads away from any real understanding of the problems people face. Additionally, the dialectical method does not envision the social world as being dominated by a cause-and-effect relationship; instead, it looks at the reciprocal relations among social factors within the totality of social life. These relations include not only contemporary phenomena but also the effects of history,

as dialecticians are concerned with how the past shapes the present and how the present lays the seeds for the future. Because of this complex set of relations, which often fold back in on themselves, the future is both indeterminate and contingent on individual action. Indeed, this relationship between actors and structures is at the heart of Marx's theory. Structures both constrain and enable individuals, having the potential of both helping them to fulfill themselves and contributing to their exploitation.

Human Nature

Marx's insights into actors and structures must be understood in the context of his views on human nature, which is the basis for his critical analysis of the contradictions of capitalism. Marx viewed human nature as historically contingent, shaped by many of the same relations that affect society. In his view, a contradiction exists between our human nature and work in the capitalist system. Though we have powers that identify us as unique animals, our species being, the possibilities for realizing human potential within the capitalist system are frustrated by the structures of capitalism itself. Unlike most social theories that have implicit assumptions about human nature, Marx elaborates a concept of human nature that

also informed his view of how society should look. An important factor in this is Marx's ideas about labor. By objectifying our ideas and satisfying our needs, labor both expresses our human nature and changes it. Through this process, individuals develop their human powers and potentials.

Alienation

Under capitalism, the relationship between labor and human expression changes: rather than laboring to fulfill their needs or express ideas, workers do so at the demands of capitalists. Workers are alienated from their labor because it no longer belongs to the worker, but rather to the capitalist. This alienates workers in four ways:

1. Workers are alienated from their productive activity, in that they no longer labor to satisfy their own needs.

2. Workers are alienated from the product of their labor, which now belongs to the capitalist. Instead of finding expression in producing, workers turn to consuming to express themselves.

3. The cooperative nature of work is destroyed through the organization of the labor process, alienating workers from their fellow workers. Additionally,

workers often must compete against one another for work and pay. 4. Workers are alienated from their human potential, as the transformative

potential of labor is lost under capitalism.

The Structures of Capitalist Society

Marx wrote in response to the rapid changes taking place in Europe in response to industrialization, particularly in Germany. This period of dislocation and poverty is the context for Marx's notion of alienation, and his critiques were designed to show that capitalism was the basis for alienation and to develop a plan for action for overcoming the structures of capitalism. Marx understood that inherent within capitalism was also a system of power: it is both economic and political; it both coerces and exploits workers. Actions undertaken in the name of economic necessity disguise political decisions For example, although it is an accepted economic method for dealing with inflation, raising interest rates protects the wealthy, while causing unemployment among the poor. The political decision to privilege the wealthy at the expense of workers is hidden behind economics.

Commodities

Marx's understanding of commodities (products of labor intended for exchange) is

central to understanding his ideas about the nature of capitalism. Commodities produced to subsist and to satisfy their needs have use value. Under capitalism, where workers produce for others and exchange commodities for money, products have exchange value. Because it is often unclear where a commodity's value comes

from, it takes on an independent, external reality. Marx called this the fetishism of commodities, when the value of an object or commodity is believed to be tied to something "natural" or independent of human action, such as markets. Thus, the reality that value originates from labor and the satisfaction of needs is obscured. Marx used the term reification to describe the process whereby social structures become naturalized, absolute, independent of human action, and unchangeable. Just as the fetishism of commodities obscures the relationship between

commodities, value, and human labor, reification obscures the underlying relationships within the capitalist system and allows supposedly natural and objective social structures to dominate people.

Capital, Capitalists, and Proletariat

Under capitalism, there are two main groups: the proletariat, who are wage-

laborers, and the capitalists, who own the means of production. Whereas workers are wholly dependent upon wages, capitalists are dependent upon money invested to create more money. Capital is unique to the circulation of commodities under capitalism. Under non-capitalist forms of exchange, commodities are traded for money, which is then traded for another commodity (C1 - M - C2). The primary reason for exchange is to obtain a commodity for use. Under capitalism, money is

used to purchase a commodity, which is then sold to create a greater amount of money (M1 - C - M2). The purpose of this form of exchange is to create greater and greater sums of money.

Exploitation

Exploitation is a set of social relations on which capitalism is built. Capitalists exploit

workers by paying them less in wages than the value they produce. While a worker may earn eight dollars a day in wages, s/he may produce ten dollars a day worth of value, creating what Marx called surplus value. Capital grows by exploiting workers to generate ever greater amounts of surplus value, usually by lowering workers' wages. In addition, capitalists constantly compete with one another over capital by finding new ways to generate profit and surplus value in order to maintain an edge. Marx calls this drive the general law of capitalist accumulation. Capitalism is not the

only historical epoch in which individuals are exploited, but it is the only one in which the mechanisms of exploitation are hidden behind independent, objectified, and reified structures, such as the market.

Class Conflict

The conflict created by the contradictory positions of two groups, the proletariat and the capitalists, is at the heart of capitalism. Because these represent groups in conflict, Marx called them classes. For Marx, every period of history contained fault lines upon which potential conflict could result, and, thus, every historical period had its own class formations. Because capitalists are continually accumulating capital while also competing with other capitalists, Marx believed that more and more members of society would eventually become proletarians in a process he

called proletarianization. Society would then be characterized by a very small

number of capitalists exploiting a large number of poor proletarians subsisting on low wages. Marx called this group of proletarians the industrial reserve army. Thus, the normal operation of the capitalist system, through competition and exploitation, produces an ever greater number of workers who will eventually rise up to

overthrow the system.

Capitalism as a Good Thing

Despite his criticisms, Marx was aware of the benefits of capitalism, and generally understood it to be a good thing. The productive capacity of capitalism could free people from need, and it delivered people from the traditions that have dominated them throughout history. Marx criticized capitalism from a future-oriented perspective, based upon his understanding of what capitalism, as a revolutionary force in modern society, was capable of, and what its limits were.

Marx thought that capitalism had fully developed itself and that it was ready to enter a new mode of production, communism.

The Materialist Conception of History

Marx's future-oriented perspective has its basis in his materialist conception of history. He suggests that the ways societies provide for their material well-being affects the type of relations that people will have with one another, their social institutions, and the prevailing ideas of the day. Marx uses the term "the forces of

production" to refer to the ways in which people provide for their needs. He uses the term "relations of production" to describe social relationships that dominate the productive capacities of a society. Under capitalism, the forces of production lead to a set of relations of production which pit the capitalist and the proletariat against one another. To change the relations of production, Marx felt revolution was necessary. Revolution arises from exploited classes agitating for change in the relations of production that favor transformations in the forces of production.

Ideology

The relations of production act to dissuade revolutionary behavior, as do the prevalent ideas within society. Many of these ideas cloud the true relationships that underlie capitalist society. Marx called these kinds of ideas ideologies. The first type of ideology is emergent from the structure of society, and can be seen in things like the fetishism of commodities, or money. The second type is used by the ruling class to hide the contradiction of this system when it becomes apparent. These explain away the contradiction by making them seem coherent (as in religion or philosophy), making them seem the product of personal pathologies, or making them seem a reflection of the contradiction within human nature itself and, therefore, immutable. Marx used equality and freedom, our ideas of which stem

from the nature of commodity exchange in capitalist society. These mask the fact that we are neither equal with one another nor able to freely control our labor or the products of our labor. Capitalism inverts our notion of equality and freedom: it is capital that is freely and equally exchanged, not individuals who are free and equal.

Marx also viewed religion as an ideology. Just as freedom and equality are ideas to be cherished, religion also contains positive dimensions, but it has been used to

disguise the true set of relations that undergird capitalism.

Criticisms

Marx has faced a number of criticisms. Most importantly, actual existing communism failed to fulfill its promise. Though these experiments may have distorted Marx's thought, Marxist theory certainly did not reflect its practice. Second, history has shown that workers have rarely been in the vanguard of revolutionary movements, and indeed have resisted communism in some places. Third, Marx failed to adequately consider gender as factor in the reproduction of labor and commodity production. Fourth, some have accused Marx of focusing far too much on production, without giving enough attention to the act of consumption. Last, Marx's historical materialist approach uncritically accepts Western notions of

progress.

Emile Durkheim

Chapter 3 Chapter Summary

Sociology as a Discipline and Social Facts

Emile Durkheim(1858-1917) is considered one of the "fathers" of sociology because of his effort to establish sociology as a discipline distinct from philosophy and psychology. This effort is evident in the two main themes that permeate

Durkheim's work: the priority of the social over the individual and the idea that society can be studied scientifically. Durkheim's concept of social facts, in particular, differentiates sociology from philosophy and psychology.Social facts are the social structures and cultural norms and values that are external to, and coercive over, individuals. Social facts are not attached to any particular individual; nor are they reducible to individual consciousness. Thus, social facts can be studied empirically.

According to Durkheim, two different types of social facts exist: material and immaterial. Durkheim was most interested in studying the latter, particularly morality, collective conscience, collective representation, and social currents.

The Division of Labor

In this work Durkheim discusses how modern society is held together by a division

of labor that makes individuals dependent upon one another because they specialize in different types of work. Durkheim is particularly concerned about how the division of labor changes the way that individuals feel they are part of society as a whole. Societies with little division of labor (i.e., where people are self-sufficient) are unified by mechanical solidarity; all people engage in similar tasks and thus have similar responsibilities, which builds a strong collective conscience. Modern society, however, is held together by organic solidarity (the differences between people), which weakens collective conscience. Durkheim studied these different types of solidarity through laws. A society with mechanical solidarity is characterized by repressive law, while a society with organic solidarity is characterized by restitutive law.

Suicide

Durkheim's goal to differentiate sociology from psychology is perhaps best seen in this work on how social facts can be used to explain suicide rates. This work is also important because of the historical comparative method that Durkheim uses to show that that suicide rates vary across societies and over time. According to Durkheim, suicide cannot simply be explained by individual psychological problems-otherwise suicide rates would be static. Durkheim argues that two social facts, in

particular, influence suicide rates: integration, or the strength of attachment people

feel to society, and regulation, or the degree of external constraint on people. Durkheim distinguishes between four types of suicide that correlate to these two social facts. Egoistic suicide is a result of a lack of integration; altruistic suicide is a result of too much integration; anomic suicide is a result of too little regulation; and

fatalistic suicide is a result of too much regulation.

Elementary Forms of Religious Life

This is perhaps Durkheim's most complex work, as he attempts to provide both a sociology of religion and a theory of knowledge. In this work, Durkheim studies primitive society to demonstrate that an enduring quality of all religions, even the most modern, is the differentiation between the sacred and the profane. The sacred is created through rituals, and what is deemed sacred is what morally binds individuals to society. This moral bond then becomes, according to Durkheim, a cognitive bond that shapes the categories we use to understand the social world.

The development of religion is not simply based on the differentiation between the

sacred and the profane, but also on religious beliefs, rituals, and the church. The latter two conditions are particularly important to Durkheim because they connect the individual to the social; individuals learn about the sacred and religious beliefs through participating in rituals and the church. The most primitive form of religion is totemism, which is connected to the least complex form of social organization, the clan. The totem is the actual representation of the clan-it is the material representation of the nonmaterial, collective morality of the clan.

Totemism is important to Durkheim's theory of knowledge in that it is one of his categories of understanding: classification. Other categories of understanding include time, space, force, causality, and totality. These six categories may be abstract concepts, but they are all derived from social experiences, particularly rituals. Durkheim acknowledges that it is possible for moral and cognitive categories to change or be created anew through what he calls collective effervescence, or

periods of great collective exaltation.

Cult of the Individual

Although Durkheim focused much of his attention on the social, he did not dismiss the idea of individualism. Indeed, he believed that in modern society the individual has become sacred, and he called the modern form of collective conscience the cult of the individual. According to Durkheim, humans are constituted by two beings or selves: one is based on the isolated individuality of the body, and the other is based on the social. These two beings may be in a continual state of tension, and they are connected in that individuality develops as society develops. For example, it is only in modern society, characterized by the division of labor, that people even come to understand themselves as distinct individuals. Durkheim argued that individuality has both positive and negative consequences. Egoism, or the selfish pursuit of individual interests, is at odds with moral individualism, the ability to sacrifice self-interest for the rights of all other individual human beings.

Moral Education and Social Reform

Durkheim believed that society is the source of morality; therefore, he also believed

that society could be reformed, especially through moral education. According to

Durkheim, morality is composed of three elements: discipline, attachment, and autonomy. Discipline constrains egoistic impulses; attachment is the voluntary willingness to be committed to groups; and autonomy is individual responsibility. Education provides children with these three moral tools needed to function in

society. Adults can also acquire these moral tools by joining occupational associations. According to Durkheim, these associations would include members of a particular occupation regardless of class position and could provide a level of integration and regulation, both of which tend to be weakened by the division of labor.

Criticisms

Durkheim is often criticized for being a functionalist and a positivist. However, his historical comparative methodology puts him at odds with functionalists and positivists who believe that invariant social laws exist that can explain social phenomenon across all societies. Durkheim does tend to emphasize the objective nature of social facts; thus, he neglects the subjective interpretations that social actors may have of a particular social phenomenon and the agency of individuals in

general to control social forces. Furthermore, Durkheim's basic assumption about human nature-that people are driven by their passion for gratification that can never be satisfied-is not empirically substantiated in any of his work. Finally, Durkheim's understanding of the relationship between morality and sociology has been critiqued as being conservative.

Max Weber

Chapter 4 Chapter Summary

Max Weber's Methodology

Max Weber (1864-1920) argued against abstract theory, and he favored an approach to sociological inquiry that generated its theory from rich, systematic, empirical, historical research. This approach required, first of all, an examination of the relationships between, and the respective roles of, history and sociology in inquiry. Weber argued that sociology was to develop concepts for the analysis of concrete phenomena, which would allow sociologists to then make generalizations about historical phenomena. History, on the other hand, would use a lexicon of sociological concepts in order to perform causal analysis of particular historical events, structures, and processes. In scholarly practice, according to Weber, sociology and history are interdependent.

Weber contended that understanding, or verstehen, was the proper way of studying social phenomena. Derived from the interpretive practice known as hermeneutics, the

method ofverstehen strives to understand the meanings that human beings attribute to their experiences, interactions, and actions. Weber construed verstehen as a methodical, systematic, and rigorous form of inquiry that could be employed in both macro- and micro-sociological analysis.

Weber's formulation of causality stresses the great variety of factors that may precipitate the emergence of complex phenomena such as modern capitalism.

Moreover, Weber argued that social scientists, unlike natural scientists, must take into account the meanings that actors attribute to their interactions when considering causality. Weber, furthermore, sought a middle ground between nomothetic (general laws) and idiographic (idiosyncratic actions and events) views in his notion of a probabilistic adequate causality.

Weber's greatest contribution to the conceptual arsenal of sociology is known as the ideal type. The ideal type is basically a theoretical model constructed by means of a detailed empirical study of a phenomenon. An ideal type is an intellectual construct that a sociologist may use to study historical realities by means of their similarities to, and divergences from, the model. Note that ideal types are not utopias or images of what the world ought to look like.

Weber urged sociologists to reflect on the role of values in both research and the

classroom. When teaching, he argued, sociologists ought to teach students the facts, rather than indoctrinating them to a particular political or personal point of view. Weber did argue, however, that the values of one's society often help to decide what a scholar will study. He contended that, while values play this very important role in the research

process, they must be kept out of the collection and interpretation of data.

Max Weber's Substantive Sociology

Max Weber's sociology is fundamentally a science that employs both interpretive understanding and causal explanations of social action and interaction. His typology of the four types of social action is central to comprehending his sociology. According to Weber, social action may be classified as means-ends rational action, value-rational action, affectual action, or traditional action. Any student of Weber must keep in mind that these are ideal types.

Weber developed a multidimensional theory of stratification that incorporated class, status, and party. Class is determined by one's economic or market situation (i.e., life

chances), and it is not a community but rather a possible basis for communal action. Status is a matter of honor, prestige, and one's style of life. Parties, according to Weber, are organized structures that exist for the purposes of gaining domination in some sphere of social life. Class, status, and party may be related in many ways in a given empirical case, which provides the sociologist with a very sophisticated set of conceptual tools for the analysis of stratification and power.

Weber also made a profound contribution to the study of obedience with his ideal types of legitimate domination or authority. Rational-legal authority rests on rules and law. Traditional authority rests on belief in established practices and traditions - i.e., authority is legitimate because it is exercised the way it has always been exercised. Charismatic authority rests on belief in the extraordinary powers or qualities of a leader. All of these forms of authority must take into account the point of view of those obeying commands. Moreover, each form of authority is associated with a variety of

structural forms of organization and administration. Legal authority, for example, is often associated with bureaucracy, while traditional authority is associated with gerontocracy, patriarchalism, patrimonialism, and feudalism. Charismatic authority may be associated with a charismatic form of organization. The dilemma of charismatic authority, however, consists of the difficulty of maintaining charisma when the charismatic leader dies. In other words, charismatic organizations tend to routinize charisma, which invariably gives rise to either traditional or rational-legal authority.

Weber also argued that rationalization is a long-term historical process that has transformed the modern world. His typology of forms of rationality is central to this argument. He argued that there are four types of rationality: practical, theoretical, formal, and substantive. He was most concerned with processes of formal and substantive rationalization, especially as propelled by capitalism and bureaucracy. Weber argued that rationalization has occurred in many spheres, including the economy, law, religion, politics, the city, and art.

Weber's arguments regarding rationalization are exemplified in his studies of religion and capitalism. These sophisticated and voluminous studies inquire into the ways in which religious ideas, the spirit of capitalism, and capitalism as an economic system, are interrelated. In short, according to Weber, Calvinism as a rational, methodical

system of religious beliefs and practices was an important factor in the emergence of

modern capitalism in the Western world. The economic ethics of other religions, such as Hinduism and Confucianism, inhibited the emergence of modern capitalism in India and China. Once modern capitalism emerged in the Western world, however, it spread the effects of rationalization worldwide.

While Weber's work has had a profound impact on sociology - as well as other disciplines - it is not without its critics. Some critics question the consistency and applicability of Weber's method of verstehen. Others are puzzled by Weber's methodological individualism as it is applied to macro-sociology. Some critics have rebuked Weber for failing to offer any alternatives to rationalization, capitalism, and bureaucracy. Finally, many critics decry Weber's unflagging pessimism about the future

of rationalization and bureaucracy.

Georg Simmel

Chapter 5 Chapter Summary

Georg Simmel (1858-1918) is best known as a microsociologist who played a significant role in the development of small-group research. Simmel's basic approach can be described as "methodological relationism," because he operates on the principle

that everything interacts in some way with everything else. His essay on fashion, for example, notes that fashion is a form of social relationship that allows those who wish to conform to do so while also providing the norm from which individualistic people can deviate. Within the fashion process, people take on a variety of social roles that play off the decisions and actions of others. On a more general level, people are influenced by both objective culture (the things that people produce) and individual culture (the capacity of individuals to produce, absorb, and control elements of objective culture).

Simmel believed that people possess creative capacities (more-life) that enable them to produce objective culture that transcends them. But objective culture (more-than-life) comes to stand in irreconcilable opposition to the creative forces that have produced it in the first place.

Primary Concerns

Simmel's interest in creativity is manifest in his discussions of the diverse forms of social interaction, the ability of actors to create social structures, and the disastrous effects those structures have on the creativity of individuals. All of Simmel's discussions of the forms of interaction imply that actors must be consciously oriented to one another. Simmel also has a sense of individual conscience and of the fact that the norms and values of society become internalized in individual consciousness. In

addition, Simmel has a conception of people's ability to confront themselves mentally, to set themselves apart from their own actions, which is very similar to the views of George Herbert Mead.

Simmel is best known in contemporary sociology for his contributions to our understanding of patterns or forms of social interaction. Simmel made clear that one of his primary interests was association among conscious actors and that his intent was to

look at a wide range of interactions that may seem trivial at some times but crucially important at others. One of Simmel's dominant concerns was the form rather than the content of social interaction. From Simmel's point of view, the sociologist's task is to impose a limited number of forms on social reality, extracting commonalities that are found in a wide array of specific interactions.

Along these lines, Simmel attempts to develop a geometry of social relations. The

crucial difference between the dyad (two-person group) and triad (three-person group) is that a triad presents a greater threat to the individuality of group members. In a larger society, however, an individual is likely to be involved in a number of groups, each of which controls only a small portion of his or her personality. Distance also

determines the form of social interaction. For example, the value of an object is a function of its distance from an actor. Simmel considered a wide range of social forms, including exchange, conflict, prostitution, and sociability.

One of the main focuses of Simmel's historical and philosophical sociology is the cultural level of social reality, which he called objective culture. In Simmel's view, people produce culture, but because of their ability to reify social reality, the cultural

world and the social world come to have lives of their own and increasingly dominate the actors who created them. Simmel identified a number of components of objective culture, including tools, transportation, technology, the arts, language, the intellectual sphere, conventional wisdom, religious dogma, philosophical systems, legal systems, moral codes, and ideals. The absolute size of objective culture increases with modernization. The number of different components of the cultural realm also grows. What worried Simmel most was the threat to individual culture posed by the growth of objective culture.

The Philosophy of Money

In The Philosophy of Money, Simmel assesses the impact of the money economy on the inner world of actors and the objective culture as a whole. Simmel saw money as linked with social phenomena such as exchange, ownership, greed, extravagance, cynicism, individual freedom, style of life, culture, and the value of personality. In general, he argued that people create value by making objects, separating themselves from those objects, and then seeking to overcome distance, obstacles, and difficulties. Money serves both to create distance from objects and to provide the means to overcome it. Money provides the means by which the market, the economy, and ultimately society, acquire a life of their own that is external to and coercive of the actor. Simmel saw the

significance of the individual declining as money transactions became an increasingly important part of society. A society in which money becomes an end in itself can cause individuals to become increasingly cynical and to have a blasé attitude.

Objective Culture

The increasing division of labor in modern societies leads to an improved ability to

create the various components of the cultural world. But at the same time, the highly specialized individual loses a sense of the total culture and loses the ability to control it. As objective culture grows, individual culture atrophies. The massive expansion of objective culture has had a dramatic effect on the rhythm of life. For example, our means of communication are more efficient, meaning that slow and unpredictable communication has been replaced with readily available mail, telephone, and e-mail service. On the positive side, people have much more freedom because they are less restricted by the natural rhythm of life. On the negative side, problems arise because the growth of objective culture generates cultural malaise, cultural ambivalence and, ultimately, a tragedy of culture.

Secrecy

Simmel's work on secrecy is characteristic of his work on social types. Simmel defines

secrecy as a condition in which one person is intentionally hiding something while another person is seeking to reveal what is being hidden. Simmel examines various forms of social relationships from the point of view of reciprocal knowledge and secrecy. According to Simmel, confidence is an intermediate state between knowledge

and ignorance about a person. Acquaintanceship is a relationship in which there is far more discretion and secretiveness than there is among intimates. Friendship is not based on total intimacy, but rather involves limited intimacy based on common intellectual pursuits, religion, and shared experiences. Marriage is the least secretive form of relationship. Simmel sees the secret as one of man's greatest achievements because it makes for a strong "we-feeling" among those who know the secret. But the secret is always accompanied dialectically by the possibility that it can be discovered.

Simmel thought that the social structure of modern society permits and requires a high degree of secrecy. The money economy, for example, allows people to hide transactions, acquisitions, and changes in ownership.

Criticisms

Simmel is most frequently criticized for the fragmentary character of his work. He did

not devise a systematic sociology on a par with Marx, Durkheim, or Weber. Marxists criticize Simmel for not seeing a way out of the tragedy of culture-an analytic equivalent to Marx's concept of alienation.

A Historical Sketch of Sociological Theory: The Later Years

Chapter 6 Chapter Summary

Early American Sociology

Much of early American sociology was defined by the influence of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903); various strands of Social Darwinism; and political liberalism - with the latter

paradoxically contributing to the discipline's conservativism. William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) and Lester F. Ward (1841-1913) exemplify these tendencies in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American sociological theory, but their work has certainly not passed the test of time. Other early American sociologists, especially from the Chicago School, did have an enduring impact on sociological theory. W.I. Thomas (1863-1947), Robert Park (1864-1944), Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929), and George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) profoundly shaped the theoretical landscape of symbolic interactionism, and their ideas predominated until the institutionalization of sociology at Harvard University in the 1930s. While for many years sociologists have emphasized these three theoretical orientations, scholars of sociology have recently pointed to the significance of early women sociologists such as Jane Addams (1860-1935), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), and Beatrice Potter Webb (1858-1943), as well as the race theory of W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963).

Sociology at Harvard, Marxian Theory, and the Rise and Decline of Structural Functionalism

Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968) was a central figure in the founding of sociology at Harvard University during the 1930s. Sorokin was soon overshadowed, however, by Talcott Parsons (1902-1979). Parsons is a key figure in the history of sociological theory in the

United States because he introduced European thought to large numbers of American sociologists and developed a theory of action and, eventually, structural functionalism. Parsons helped to legitimize grand theory in the United States, and produced many graduate students who carried his ideas to other departments of sociology in the U.S. The rise of structural functionalism to a dominant position in the 1940s and 1950s led to the decline of the Chicago School.

While structural functionalism was gaining ground in the United States, the Frankfurt school of critical theory was emerging in Europe. With the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists in Germany, many of the critical theorists fled to the United States, where they came into contact with American sociology. Thinkers such as Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), and Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)propounded a kind of Marxian theory that was heavily influenced by the work

of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), Max Weber (1864-1920), and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Much of the critical theorists' work, however, was neglected until the 1960s.

During the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, many criticisms and challenges to structural functionalism emerged. Radical sociologists such as C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) and conflict theorists attacked structural functionalism for its grand theory, purported political conservatism, inability to study social change, and lack of emphasis on social conflict. Other theorists, such as Erving Goffman (1922-1982) and George Homans (1910- ), developed dramaturgical analysis and exchange theory, respectively. The sociological phenomenology of Alfred Schutz (1899-1959) prompted a great deal of interest in the sociology of everyday life, which is exemplified by Harold Garfinkel's (1917- ) ethnomethodology.

The Rise and Fall of Marxian Theory

During the 1970s and 1980s, a number of scholars revived Marxist perspectives in studies of historical sociology and economic sociology, while others began to question the viability of Marxian theory given the atrocities committed in the name of Marxism and the collapse of

the Soviet Union and other Marxist regimes. Ritzer and Goodman suggest that neo-Marxian theory will see something of a renaissance as a consequence of the inequalities of globalization and the excesses of capitalism.

Late Twentieth-Century Social Theory

In the last thirty years or so, a number of theoretical perspectives have emerged. First, and

perhaps most significant, is the rise of feminist theory. Second, structuralism, post-structuralism, and post-modernism gained considerable ground - most notably in the work ofMichel Foucault (1926-1984). Third, in the United States, many sociological theorists have developed an interest in the micro-macro link. Fourth, the debate over the relationship between agency and structure - which developed mainly in Europe - has made its way into sociological theory in the U.S. Finally, in the 1990s a number of sociological thinkers have taken an interest in theoretical syntheses.

Early Twenty-First-Century Theory

While the future of sociological theory is unpredictable, a number of perspectives have come to the forefront in recent years. Multicultural social theory, for example, has exploded in the past 20 years. Post-modernism continues to be influential, though some post-post-modernists are making headway. Finally, theories of consumption are shifting the focus of sociology away from its productivist bias and toward consumers, consumer goods, and processes of consumption.

Structural Functionalism, Neofunctionalism, and Conflict

Theory

Chapter 7 Chapter Summary

Structural Functionalism

Although popular, even dominant, after World War II, structural functionalism is today generally of only historical interest. Emerging as an offshoot of organicism, structural functionalists were mainly societal functionalists who were interested in large-scale social structures and institutions within society, how they interrelate, and their constraining effects on actors.

One of the earliest and better known applications of structural functionalism was thefunctional theory of stratification. This theory argued that stratification was universal and necessary for society, and that it was therefore functional. Stratification here refers to positions rather than individuals and to the way that individuals are placed in the appropriate position. Since some positions are more important, more pleasant, and require different skills, a system of stratification is necessary to make sure all roles are fulfilled. Much like other versions of structural functionalism, this theory is criticized as conservative and lacking in empirical support.

Talcott Parsons

The single greatest contributor, and practitioner, of structural functionalism was Talcott Parsons (1902-1979). The heart of Parsons's theory is built on the four functional imperatives, also known as the AGIL system:

1. The adaptive function, whereby a system adapts to its environment. 2. The goal-attainment function, i.e., how a system defines and achieves its goals. 3. The integrative function, or the regulation of the components of the system. 4. Latency, or pattern maintenance function, i.e., how motivation and the dimensions of

culture that create and sustain motivation are stimulated.

Complementing this are four action systems, each of which serve a functional imperative: the behavioral organism performs the adaptive function; the personality system performs goal attainment; the social system performs the integrative function; and the cultural systemperforms pattern maintenance. Parsons saw these action systems acting at different levels of analysis, starting with the behavioral organism and building to the cultural system. He saw these levels hierarchically, with each of the lower levels providing the impetus for the higher levels, with the higher levels controlling the lower levels.

Parsons was concerned primarily with the creation of social order, and he investigated it using his theory based on a number of assumptions, primarily that systems are interdependent; they tend towards equilibrium; they may be either static or involved in change; that allocation and integration are particularly important to systems in any particular point of equilibrium; and that systems are self-maintaining. These assumptions led him to focus primarily on order but to

overlook, for the most part, the issue of change.

The basic unit of Parsons's social system is the status-role complex. Actors are seen as a collection of statuses and roles relatively devoid of thought. Parsons's interest was in the large-scale components of social systems, such as collectivities, norms, and values. Parsons also thought that social systems had a number of functional prerequisites, such as compatibility with other systems, fulfillment of the needs of actors, support from other systems, inducing adequate levels of participation from its members, controlling deviance, controlling conflict, and language.

Parsons was particularly interested in the role of norms and values. He focused on the socialization process, whereby society instills within individuals an outlook in which it is possible for them to pursue their own self-interest while still serving the interests of the system as a whole. It was through socialization that Parsons believed that actors internalized the norms of society. Physical or coercive systems of control were seen as only a secondary line of defense.

The cultural system is at the very pinnacle of action systems. For instance, Parsons believed that culture had the capability of becoming a part of other systems, such as norms and values in the social system. Culture is defined as a patterned, ordered system of symbols that are objects of orientation to actors, internalized aspects of the personality system, and institutionalized patterns. The symbolic nature of culture allows it to control other action systems.

The personality system generates personality, defined as the organized orientation and motivation of action in the individual actor, built by need-dispositions and shaped by the social setting. Again Parsons presents a passive view of actors.

In order to deal with change, Parsons turned to a form of evolutionary theory, focusing on differentiation and adaptive upgrading. He suggested three evolutionary stages: primitive, intermediate, and modern. This perspective suffers from a number of flaws, primarily because it sees change as generally positive and does not deal with the process of change, but rather points of equilibrium across periods of change.

One way that Parsons does inject a real sense of dynamism into his theory is with the concept of the generalized media of interchange. Although this concept is somewhat ambiguous, it can be thought of as resources, particularly symbolic resources, for which there is a universal desire (e.g., money, influence, or political power). The suggestion that individuals might act to influence the social distribution of such resources (as media entrepreneurs) adds dynamism to what is often seen as a static theory.

Robert Merton

Robert Merton(1910-2003) attempted to rectify some of the weaknesses within structural functionalism. Specifically, he criticized the underlying assumptions of functionalism and added complexity to how structural functionalism dealt with the relationship between structures and functions. Dispensing with the notion that all parts of the system are functional, highly integrated, and indispensable, he created a system of concepts to deal with the ways in which structures may be related to the whole. For instance, he suggested that some social facts might be dysfunctional, meaning they may have negative consequences for other social facts. Overall, he thought that it was possible to have an idea of the balance of a structure by taking into account dysfunctions, functions, and nonfunctions. He also added additional complexity by asserting that this sort of analysis may be performed at various levels of functional analysis, as "functions" might be a matter of perspective. For instance, slavery was functional for some and dysfunctional for others.

Merton was also concerned with the intended and unintended functions of structures, ormanifest and latent functions, and their unanticipated consequences. He added nuance to structural functionalism by noting that dysfunctional structures can exist within systems, depending on

their relationship to other systems. Thus not all structures are positive, nor are all of them indispensable.

Merton also took up Emile Durkheim's (1857-1917) notion of anomie. He suggested that when individuals cannot act in accordance with normalized values or realize normalized goals because of the obstacles created by social structures, it produces deviant behavior.

Criticisms

There are a number of criticisms of structural functionalism: it is ahistorical; it is unable to deal effectively with the process of change or conflict; and it is conservative. It is viewed as ambiguous and lacking in adequate methods. Structural functionalism inhibits certain forms of analyses, such as comparative analysis. Structural functionalism has also been described as both illegitimately teleological and tautological. The former implies that structural functionalists rely too heavily on the notion that social structures have purposes or goals. This notion is posited to justify the existence of particular structures without adequate theoretical reasons or empirical backing. Tautology suggests that the conclusion of a theory makes explicit what is implicit in the premise of the theory. Thus, structural functionalism defines the whole in terms of the parts and the parts in terms of the whole.

Neofunctionalism

Neofunctionalism was an attempt by theorists such as Jeffrey Alexander, among others, to revive the stronger tenets of structural functionalism. Neofunctionalism attempted to synthesize portions of structural functionalism with other theories. It highlighted the interactional patterning of the elements that constitute society, attended to both action and order, understood integration as a possibility rather than as fact, adopted various portions of Parsons's action systems, and traced the process of social change that resulted from differentiation within action systems.

Conflict Theory

Associated primarily with the work of Ralf Dahrendorf (1929- ), conflict theory arose primarily as a reaction against structural functionalism and in many ways represents its antithesis. Where structural functionalism sees a near harmony of purpose from norms and values, conflict theory sees coercion, domination, and power. Dahrendorf saw both theories as addressing different situations, depending upon the focus of the study. According to Dahrendorf, functionalism is useful for understanding consensus while conflict theory is appropriate for understanding conflict and coercion.

For Dahrendorf the distribution of authority was a key to understanding social conflict. Authority is located not within people but within various positions. Authority is created by the expectation of certain types of action associated with particular positions, including subordination of others and subordination to others. Various positions of authority exist within associations. The fault lines that spring up around competing loci of authority generate conflicting groups. The conflict between these groups pervades their interaction, with the result that authority is often challenged and tenuous.

Much as Merton looked at latent and manifest functions, Dahrendorf identified latent and manifest interests, or unconscious and conscious interests. The connection between these two concepts was a major problematic for conflict theory. Dahrendorf posited the existence of three types of groups: quasi- groups, interest groups, and conflict groups. Dahrendorf felt that, under ideal circumstances, conflict could be explained without reference to any other variables.

Conflict theory has been criticized for being ideologically radical, underdeveloped, and unable to deal with order and stability. Both functionalism and conflict theory share the weakness of being able to explain only portions of social life.

Conflict Sociology

Randall Collins developed a form of conflict theory that focuses far more on micro-level interactions than does Dahrendorf. It criticized previous conflict theories and theories of stratification as "failures," and attempted to focus on the role of individual action in the process of stratification. His theory of stratification is rooted in Marxist, phenomenological, and ethnomethodological concerns, focusing on material arrangements and exploitation in real-life situations. Collins extended his theory to deal with various dimensions of stratification, such as gender and age inequality, as well as looking at stratification within formal organizations.

Varieties of Neo-Marxian Theory

Chapter 8 Chapter Summary

Since the time of Karl Marx's writing, a variety of theories have emerged that bear the Marxian legacy, although in many different ways.

Economic Determinism

Although it is often said that Marx was an economic determinist, or, rather, that he focused narrowly on how the economic dimension of society determined the shape of the rest of society, this view overlooks Marx's dialectical inclinations. A number of the so-called revisionist Marxists, including Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), Karl Kautsky (1850-1938), and Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932), espoused an economically deterministic brand of Marxism, influenced primarily by the boom and busts that characterized this period of capitalism.

Hegelian Marxism

One reaction to the growth of economic determinism was a renewed focus on Marx's philosophical writings, particularly their Hegelian roots. Although a number of Marx's early writings, which were primarily philosophical in their orientation, were unpublished and therefore unavailable to scholars at the time, Georg Lukács (1885-1971) managed to anticipate much of what was to be revealed of Marx's philosophical perspective. In particular, Lukács focused on two major concepts - reification and class consciousness. With reification he extended Marx's notion of the fetishism of commodities to include the process by which any portion of social

life could be made a "thing," rather than just commodities. Lukács also developed the notion of class consciousness, or the belief systems shared by those who occupy the same class position within society. Conversely, those who occupy the same class position may be unaware of their common lot, and may possess a false consciousness. Although classes are a part of every historical epoch, to Lukács it was only under capitalism that a class could achieve true class consciousness and be a truly revolutionary force. Lukács discussed the ways in which the nature of the capitalist system is obscured. He thought that once these were revealed,

society would become a battleground in the conflict between those who wished to conceal the class character of society and those who wished to expose it.

Another important Hegelian Marxist is Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Gramsci rejected deterministic Marxist formulations, focusing instead on how revolution was contingent on action on the part of the masses, assuming they became conscious of the nature of capitalism and their role in it. This they could do only by using the analysis provided to them by intellectuals. Perhaps the most important contribution Gramsci made to Neo-Marxian theory has been the concept of hegemony, which he referred to as the cultural leadership exercised by the ruling class. Thus, revolutionary forces must not only change the material bases of society, but they

must also wrest from its oppressors the cultural leadership of society.

Critical Theory

Critical theory grew up around a group of German neo-Marxists who were unhappy with the economic determinism of turn-of-the-century Marxism. Rather than

focusing on the material dimensions of society, the critical school focused primarily on culture. As its name suggests, critical theory is predominantly known for offering critiques of various dimensions of society. Central to this were its critiques of positivism (it leads to passivity), sociology (for its scientism), modern society (rationalization and the absence of reasonableness, as in the rationality), and culture (the pacifying and repressive effects of mass culture disseminated by the culture industry). The critical school has been credited with refocusing attention on subjective phenomena, despite Marx's materialist tendencies. For example, the critical school also had an interest in ideology and its role in domination. They were also dialecticians who attempted to relate the parts of society to its whole, or its totality. Critical theory has been criticized for its lack of historical focus, its weak treatment of economic factors, and its lack of faith in the working class as a revolutionary force.

A slightly different variant found within the critical school tradition is the work of Jurgen Habermas(1929- ). Habermas believes that Marx oversimplified the social component of species-being. Habermas takes as his starting point the necessity of communicative action in the realization of species-being, which emerges from the distinction between purposive-rational action (work) and communicative action (interaction). While Marx's central problematic was the alienation of workers, Habermas's is the alienation of communication, or the

"distortion" of communication. Habermas is concerned with the technological dominance of life through the rationalization of purposive-action. However, unlike other theorists, Habermas argues that rationalization can have a positive effect if it rationalizes communication, which would lead to a communication free from domination, creating a form of emancipatory communication. Habermas's idea of a rational society is a society constructed of free communication, where ideas are weighed on their merits and unaltered by ideology.

Neo-Marxian Economic Sociology

Noting that the period in which Marx formulated his critique of capitalism was a specific period in the development of capitalism, a number of theorists have attempted to develop work that more accurately portrays the workings of the

capitalist system as it exists today. This can be seen as a shift away from focusing

on the era of competitive capitalism and towards looking at what has been called monopoly capitalism. Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy are the major contributors to this line of work, particularly in their book Monopoly Capitalism. Monopoly capitalism involves a transformation in the ways in which companies

operate. Under monopoly capitalism, firms compete on the basis of advertising and marketing rather than price. Further, markets are dominated by a small number of very large firms. Lastly, there are many owners, in the form of stockholders, and managers play a much larger role in the operation of the capitalist firms. Similar work has been done byHarry Braverman. Braverman took a microscopic view and looked at changes in the labor process. He emphasized that the control of workers required task specialization, the separation of knowledge and execution, and

scientific management techniques. The overall effect of these strategies is to increase productivity while decreasing the cost of labor. Machinery also plays a role in this process. Braverman was one of the first neo-Marxists to deal with white-collar clerical workers, as he tried to show that they faced a set of strategies of control very similar to that faced by manual laborers.

One important line of research surrounds the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. Fordism is characterized by the assembly line and mass-production techniques, whereas post-Fordism involves small, flexible production runs and high technology. The importance of the Fordism/post-Fordism debate is related to the argument of whether our current society is modern or postmodern. While some have argued that post-Fordism is an improvement over Fordism, this overlooks the fact that both exist simultaneously across the world and that empirical studies have shown increased stress levels for those working in post-Fordist environments.

Historically Oriented Marxism

Perhaps the single most important contributor to historical Marxism has been Immanuel Wallerstein (1930- ). Unlike other Marx-influenced thinkers, Wallerstein focused on world-systems as his unit of analysis. The current capitalist

world economy is but one of three possible world-systems, along with the world empire and a socialist world government, the latter of which has never existed. Wallerstein breaks down the world system into core,periphery, and semi-periphery. The core dominates the world economy and exploits the others. The periphery provides raw materials, and the semi-periphery is a mix of the two. The world-system eventually incorporated every nation, and was structured by three processes: geographical expansion, the worldwide division of labor, and the development of the core states. The world-systems perspective has been criticized for under-developing a central Marxist problematic, since it focuses on relations within the world system rather than relations between classes.

Neo-Marxian Spatial Analysis

A number of Marxists, influenced by the work of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), have turned to an analysis of the production of space. Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) focuses on the ways in which space is used to reproduce the capitalist system and the class structure that underpins it. For Lefebvre, notions of space propagated by elites are used to achieve and maintain dominance, distorting the use of space that would flow from people's natural experience of it. Edward Soja attempts to integrated space, geography, and time. He developed the notion of trialectics to understand cities as historical-social-spatial phenomena, with an

emphasis on the spatial dimension. David Harvey highlights the attention Marx paid to the spatial dimension, and the strength and weaknesses of his positions. For Harvey, the necessity of capitalist expansion puts space near the center of Marx's theory. Marx is faulted for paying little attention to the problematics

inherent in the territorial organization of states and for ignoring the way space differentiates strata of the working class.

Post-Marxist Theory

Post-Marxists may be characterized by their nihilistic approach to the history of Marxist thought, to the extent that they dispose of much of Marx's philosophical underpinnings, as well as repudiating the existence of any truly Marxist "method." John Roemer's analytical Marxism attempts to employ modern positivistic methods of analysis to create a better "scientific" Marxism. This includes incorporating rational-choice and game-theoretic orientations. Erik Olin Wright has tried to bring robust, complex, empirical methods to the investigation of Marxist themes. This has led him to break from Marx in at least one way, illustrated in his notion of contradictory locations within class relations. This

suggests that individuals may hold multiple, sometimes contradictory, class positions.

Marxian theory as a field has not escaped the wide-ranging influence of postmodern thought. It has led to a focus on the relationship between discourse and ideology, time-space compression, and the continuity between Fordism/post-Fordism and modernity/postmodernity.

More generally, Ronald Aronson has gone so far as to suggest that Marxism as a coherent theory is dead. The fall of the Soviet Union, and communism more generally, is seen as the ultimate historical test of Marxian thought, and it has failed. The birth of so many variants of Marxism has destroyed its powerful coherence in totality. Aronson views these new modifications as pure theory, and

not as an expression of the unification of theory and practice that was central to Marx's work. Because of this, he does not believe that these new formulations should be called Marxist.

Systems Theory

Chapter 9 Chapter Summary

Sociology and Modern Systems Theory

Despite the checkered past of systems theory in sociology, some scholars have pointed to its advantages. Walter Buckley (1921-), for example, argued that systems theory

provides a way to unify all the behavioral and social sciences; it is a multi-leveled approach; it is interested in many varied relationships in the social world; it emphasizes processes of information and communication; it is integrative; and it views the world in dynamic terms.

Buckley maintained that three different kinds of systems exist: mechanical, organic, and sociocultural. These three kinds of systems differ qualitatively as well as

quantitatively - i.e., in terms of the way they work as well as their degree of complexity and instability. Systems may also be described in terms of the degree to which they are open or closed. Open systems (e.g., sociocultural systems) tend to respond to a greater range of fluctuations in the environment than closed systems do. Closed systems generally are entropic (i.e., they tend to break down), while open systems tend to be negentropic (i.e., they tend to elaborate structures).

Sociocultural systems are often purposive and goal-seeking due to their capacity to receive feedback from their environments. Feedback - which is key to the cybernetic approach to systems analysis - allows analysts to take into account change, growth, friction, and evolution in their studies of social systems. Moreover, systems theorists emphasize the importance of internal processes such as morphogenesis (processes of system change) and morphostasis (processes of system maintenance). Social

systems develop mediating systems for the purposes of maintenance and change.

Niklas Luhmann's General Systems Theory

Niklas Luhmann(1927-1998) addressed the problems of structural-functionalism by focusing on self-reference and contingency (i.e., the fact that things could have developed differently) in systems. Luhmann maintained that systems are always less

complex than their environments. Systems simplify by selecting pieces of information from the complexity of an environment. Since systems are forced to select from a plethora of pieces of information within an environment, the systems theorist must acknowledge the contingency of a system's selections, because the system could have selected differently. This contingency entails risk, because paying attention to some bits of information while ignoring others may have unforeseen consequences for the system if what is ignored is important to the user of the information.

Autopoietic systems, according to Luhmann, produce their own basic elements; they are self-organizing insofar as they create their own boundaries and internal structures; they are self-referential insofar as their elements refer to the system itself; and they are closed systems insofar as they do not deal directly with their environments, but

rather with representations of their environments.

Society is an autopoietic system. According to Luhmann, the most basic element of society is communication, and anything that is not communication is part of a society's environment (e.g., biological and psychic systems). Both psychic and social systems - which are environments for each other - rely on meaning. In Luhmann's theory, meaning is comprehensible because of contingency. In other words, meaning emerges

only because a specific action is different from other possible actions.

Double contingency refers to the fact that every communication must consider the way in which it will be received. In Luhmann's view, social structures (e.g., roles and norms) make it more likely that communications will be understood by both sender and receiver. Social structures also give communications some continuity over time. Double contingency thus provides much of the impetus for the evolution of social systems.

Luhmann's theory eschews teleological views of evolution - i.e., the outcomes of evolution are not predefined. Evolution, in Luhmann's view, is a set of processes that includes variation, selection, and the stabilization of reproducible characteristics. Note that the process of selection does not entail the choice of the best possible solution. Selections often occur not because they are optimal, but because they are the easiest to stabilize.

Luhmann's theory of differentiation is closely connected to his view of evolution. In Luhmann's view, differentiation is the means by which a system deals with changes in its environment. Differentiation tends to increase the amount of complexity in a given system - that is, as an environment changes, a system (e.g., a bureaucracy) will develop new departments in order to deal with such changes. Luhmann argues that

four forms of differentiation occur: segmentary, stratificatory, center-periphery, and functional differentiation. The latter form of differentiation, according to Luhmann, is the most complex and problematic for modern society, since it means that problems are often displaced from the level of society to one of its subsystems (e.g., the problem of ecology).

Finally, Luhmann argues that society is a world society that may on be observed only

from within the system. In Luhmann's view, knowledge of society may be gained through the observation of the relationship between a society and its semantics, or the way in which a society describes itself.

While Luhmann has made many contributions to sociological theory, one must acknowledge some criticisms of his work. First, many thinkers view his theory of evolution and functional differentiation as something to resist rather than embrace. Others question his notion of differentiation as development. They point to processes of de-differentiation and interpenetration as equally important counter-processes. Other scholars are skeptical of Luhmann's ability to describe the inter-relationships between systems. Moreover, many scholars cast doubt on Luhmann's sociology of knowledge as inconsistent.

Symbolic Interactionism

Chapter 10 Chapter Summary

The Historical Roots of Symbolic Interactionism

Symbolic interactionism, especially the work of George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), traces its roots to two intellectual traditions: pragmatism and psychological behaviorism. Mead adopted from the pragmatists three important themes: (1) a

focus on the interaction between actors and the social world, (2) a view of both actors and the social world as dynamic processes, and (3) the centrality of actors' ability to interpret the social world. In sum, both pragmatism and symbolic interactionism view thinking as a process. Mead recognized the importance of overt, observable behavior, but expanded the understanding of mental capacities of most psychological behaviorists by stressing the importance of covert behavior. Unlike the radical behaviorists, Mead believed that there were significant

differences between human beings and animals, particularly the human capacity to use language and dynamically created social reality.

The Ideas of Mead

Mead's most widely read work, Mind, Self and Society, gives priority to society over the mind and highlights the idea that the social leads to the development of mental

states. To Mead, the mind is a process, not a thing, and is found in social phenomena rather than within individuals. The act is the fundamental union in Mead's theory, and it is represented by four stages: impulse, perception, manipulation, and consummation. The basic mechanism of the social act, according to Mead, is the gesture. Mead pays particular attention to one kind of gesture, significant symbols, which make it possible for humans to think, to communicate, and to be stimulators of their own actions.

The self occupies a central place in Mead's theory. Mead defines the self as the ability to take oneself as an object and identifies the basic mechanism of the development of the self as reflexivity - the ability to put ourselves into the place of others and act as they act. Mead makes it clear that a self can arise only through social experiences, and he traces its development to two stages in childhood: the

play stage and the game stage. During the play stage, children learn how to take the attitude of particular others to themselves, but it is only during the game stage that children learn how to take the roles of many others and the attitude of the generalized other. Mead also discussed the difference between the "I" and the "me" in his theory of the self. The "I" is the immediate response of an individual to the other; it is the unpredictable and creative aspect of the self. The "me" is the organized set of attitude of others that an individual assumes; it is how society

dominates the individual and is a source of social control.

The Basic Principles of Symbolic Interactionism

The basic principles of symbolic interactionism include the following: (1) human beings possess the capacity for thought, which is shaped by social interaction; (2) people learn meanings and symbols through social interaction; and (3) people are able to modify or alter the meanings and symbols they use in interactions by interpreting the situations they are engaged in.

Socialization is one way individuals learn to think, interact with one another, and

understand how to use meanings and symbols. Defining the situation is another way that individuals actively engage in creating the social world. Finally, developing a "looking-glass" self helps individuals to perceive and judge the impressions we make on others we interact with.

The Work of Goffman

Erving Goffman (1922-1982) focused on dramaturgy, a view of social life as a series of dramatic performances, and he was interested in how the self is shaped by the dramatic interactions between social actors and their audiences. The basic unit of analysis in Goffman's work is a team, which is any set of individuals who cooperate in staging a single act or routine. The central theme in his work is impression management, or the techniques that social actors use to maintain

particular images of themselves when they encounter problems during interactions. As a general rule, most individuals feel the need to hide certain things about themselves when they are engaged in a performance. Goffman used the concepts of front stage, personal front, setting, appearance, manner, and back stage to discuss the theater of social life. According to Goffman, fronts tend to become institutionalized and are therefore selected rather than created. Personal fronts consist of appearance, or expressive equipment that tells the audience what kind of role the performer expects to play in a particular situation. The back stage is where actors engage in informal action that is suppressed when on front stage.

Goffman also addressed the issue of stigma in his work. Stigmas emerge when there is a gap between a person's virtual social identity and actual social identity. Goffman differentiated between discredited stigmas, which actors assume when their stigmas are evident to audience members (like loss of a nose) and discreditable stigmas, which audience members are unaware of unless an actor discloses this information (like his being infertile.) According to Goffman, we all possess some type of stigma, depending on the situations we are in.

Later in his career Goffman moved away from symbolic interactionism to the study of small-scale structures or frames. Frames are understood by Goffman as rules

that constrain social action and function to organize experience. He also described frames as the rituals of everyday life. Goffman's move toward studying frames and rituals led him away from his earlier cynical view social life and brought him closer to Durkheim's work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

Criticisms of Symbolic Interactionism and Its New Directions

Symbolic interactionism has been criticized for relying too much on qualitative methodology and for failing to incorporate quantitative methodology into its research program. It has also been criticized for being too vague on the conceptual front and for downplaying large-scale social structures. Given its micro-level focus,

some have argued that symbolic interactionism is not microscopic enough, because it tends to ignore psychological factors.

Symbolic interactionists are currently trying to answer some of these criticisms by integrating micro- and macro-level theories and synthesizing their approach across other fields of study. For example, some scholars are redefining Mead's theory to show that it accounts for both micro- and macro-level phenomena. Others are

using role theory as a way to integrate structure and meaning. Some symbolic interactionists are focusing more attention on culture and are working within cultural studies to examine the role communication technologies play in producing and representing social reality.

Symbolic interactionism has changed considerably since its inception. According to one symbolic interactionist, Gary Fine, the field has fragmented, resulting in

greater diversity. It has expanded beyond its concerns with micro-level relations, incorporated ideas from other theoretical perspectives, and been adopted by sociologists who would not define themselves as symbolic interactionists.

Ethnomethodology

Chapter 11 Chapter Summary

What is Ethnomethodology?

Ethnomethodology is the study of the methods or practices that people use to accomplish their everyday lives. The founder of this sociological approach, Harold Garfinkel(1917-), was particularly interested in how social actors provide accounts of situations. Ethnomethodologists are not so much concerned with the actual content of these accounts, but rather with the practice of accounting as a topic of analysis. For example, an ethnomethodologist might study how a telephone conversation is shaped by the actions of a caller and the responses of a receiver rather than by the subject matter of the conversation. Early ethnomethodological research included breaching experiments, which required subjects to deliberately disrupt the typical procedures of everyday actions (e.g., addressing family members in a formal manner). Today, ethnomethodologists focus their studies on social interactions in two broad areas: conversation analysis and institutional settings.

Conversation Analysis

The goal of conversation analysis is to study the ways in which conversations are organized. The unit of analysis of this method is the relationship among utterances, not the relationship between speakers and hearers. Conversation analysts have researched

a variety of different types of speech, including telephone conversations, laughter, applause, booing, and even nonverbal communication. The openings of telephone conversations have been analyzed to discover the sequences social actors use to identify and recognize each other without the benefit of visual contact. The organization of utterances has also been analyzed in terms of how laugher is initiated. In a two-party conversation, the speaker uses two techniques to generate laughter from the listener: either laughing at the end of an utterance or laughing mid-sentence. However,

in a multi-party conversation, someone other than the speaker usually initiates laughter.

Political speeches have also been analyzed in terms of how politicians generate applause from their audiences. Politicians have been found to use seven different rhetorical devices to generate applause, the most common being contrasting the same point within a statement. Applause, like agreement, is generated promptly, in an

unqualified manner, and requires no special account. In contrast, disagreement, particularly booing a public speaker, is delayed, qualified, and accountable. Unlike applause or agreement, booing is not a result of individual decision-making, but of mutual monitoring among audience members. Audience members will listen for vocal cues (e.g., whispering or jeering) among each other, and they will predict from these cues that no one will be booing alone.

Other important findings of conversation analysts include the fact the story-telling is a collaborative process: audiences are not passive recipients of stories, but can actively shape a story as it is being told. Conversation analysts have also found that shyness and self-confidence, usually thought of as psychological traits, are actually

accomplished through speech acts, particularly "setting-talk." "Setting-talk" refers to talk about our immediate surroundings (e.g., the weather). Shyness is accomplished by engaging in "setting-talk," while self-confidence is accomplished by addressing the actual topic at hand.

Studies of Institutions

Analyzing conversations and social interactions that take place within institutional settings is another area of research for ethnomethodologists. Research of job interviews has found that interviewers use different strategies to prevent interviewees from returning to or even correcting questions that have been asked. A study of negotiations among business executives discovered that they are generally detached and impersonal. Telephone calls to emergency centers have been found to be structured in such a way that confusion arises because of the lack of everyday

openings, sequences, and recognition. While emergency dispatchers are often blamed for this confusion, ethnomethodologists have shown that it is the specific organization of the conversation that causes mishaps. Finally, research on mediation hearings has shown that the institutional setting of conflict resolution lessens the chance of conversations escalating into arguments.

Criticisms of Traditional Sociology

Ethnomethodologists are critical of traditional sociologists because the latter focus on the socially constructed world instead of the everyday practices of social actors. According to ethnomethodologists, traditional sociologists distort the social world by relying too much on statistical analysis and preconceived coding categories, which mask the sophisticated interactions people use to accomplish everyday life. Indeed,

traditional sociologists are becoming increasing removed from the real world as they come to depend on research techniques that do not require them to actually observe everyday practices. Ethnomethodologists criticize conventional sociologists for confusing topic and resource - the everyday social world becomes more of a resource than a topic in its own right.

Stresses and Strains in Ethnomethodology

Conventional sociologists view this sociological perspective with suspicion, because they feel it focuses on trivial matters. Others worry that ethnomethodology has become increasingly removed from its phenomenological roots, neglecting internal motivations for action. Another concern raised by ethnomethodologists is that the perspective is beginning to lose sight of its original radical reflexivity, particularly the emphasis on how all social activity is accomplished. Finally, although some ethnomethodologists worry about the capacity for this perspective to bridge the micro-macro divide, others feel that there are positive signs that ethnomethodology is well-suited for synthesizing and integrating micro-level interactions with macro-level structures. Indeed, the "radical thesis" of ethnomethodology is that it transcends the issue of micro-macro linkages because micro and macro structures are generated simultaneously.

Exchange, Network, and Rational Choice Theories

Chapter 12 Chapter Summary

This chapter focuses on three theories: exchange theory, network theory, and rational choice theory.

Exchange Theory

Exchange theory has its roots in behaviorism and rational choice theory. Behaviorism,

taken from psychology, is concerned with how behavior is modified by its consequences, particularly how rewards and costs act as incentives or disincentives for various forms of behavior. Rational choice theory, which is derived from neoclassical economics, focuses on how actors seek to achieve their ends or goals in the face of limited resources and institutions. From this perspective, actors act purposefully to maximize their utility by rationally deciding upon courses of action appropriate for their resources within the context of various social institutions, which encourage or

discourage various courses of action. These two theories were influential in the early stages of exchange theory.

The father of exchange theory, George Homans (1910 - 1989), dealt primarily with the psychological principles underlying social behavior. Although psychology was concerned primarily with individual behavior, Homans felt that the rules governing individual behavior were sufficient to explain all of social behavior. At the heart of his theory was the idea that people acted to maximize their rewards in their social action. Thus, the act of maximization usually involved an exchange with at least one other person, although this exchange need not be-and usually was not-monetarily based, but rather was the exchange of approval or disapproval, reward or punishment. Thus, the various ways in which actors may mutually reinforce various forms of behavior explain the hybridity of social action. Homans developed a number of propositions that help explain social behavior, taken by and large from behaviorism and rational choice. Taken

together, Homans's theory creates an actor who is a rational profit-seeker, where profit may be considered anything that is viewed as positive for the actor, including the approval or positive reinforcement of others. The actor is rational to the extent that she/he chooses courses of action that have the greatest likelihood of producing desired results. Homans was criticized for not taking fully into account mental states, and for not being able to adequately explain large-scale social structures.

Peter Blau (1918-2002) also developed a version of exchange theory. Much like Homans, he attempted to use the rules that govern the relations between individuals and groups as the basis for understanding social structures. Blau developed a four-stage sequence that detailed the movement from "personal exchange transactions" through "differentiation of status and power" on to the "legitimization and organization," and into "opposition and change," thus detailing how "exchange" can

lead to both social structures and social change. Blau also roots his actors in the

rewards and penalties involved in social interaction, but gives more importance to social structures that emerge from interaction between actors. Blau felt that these social structures could affect the process of interaction itself. Blau also pushed the boundaries of exchange theory by dealing with two kinds of organizations-both those

that were emergent from exchange and formal organizations, established to achieved specific objectives, such as firms or political parties. Lastly, Blau recognized the difference between large scale, complex social structures and small groups and asserted that different rules do in fact govern these collectivities. Social structures were governed by norms and values. He thought the "value consensus" within large collectivities was a form of indirect exchange among actors, actors who would otherwise not frequently exchange with every other member in the society or

community.

Richard Emerson (1925-1982) also developed a version of exchange theory. Much as Homans and Blau attempted to move from micro-level interaction to macro-level structures, Emerson employs many of the same principles to make a similar move. However, he gives greater attention to sets of exchange relationships, which he calls exchange networks. These networks are dependent upon the possibility of the exchange of valued resources among all actors. Thus micro-level exchange can build large structures. The focus on valued resources and opportunities also allows Emerson to discuss power and dependency among actors.

Network Theory

In an attempt to move away from atomistic and normal approaches, network theorists look at the pattern of ties linking actors together. Actors here may be groups, corporations, or even societies, and they may be bound together by various forms of bonds, such as "strong" or "weak" ties. Although network theory is still in its relative infancy, it does have a number of guiding principles that specify how ties work, how stratification develops within the network, and how collaboration and competition emerge.

Network Exchange Theory

Network exchange theory combines elements of both exchange and network theory. It attempts to merge the strong model of structure in network theory with the strong model of relations between actors in exchange theory. Network exchange theory thus strengthens network theory's weak view of agency and exchange theory's weak view of

structure. Network exchange theory looks at exchanges within the context of networks of exchanges, with particular attention paid to the structural dimension (size, shape, connections) of the network within which exchanges take place. Much like exchange theory, it pays considerable attention to power in exchanges, as well as dependency and vulnerability. Network exchange theorists identify two different types of networks: strong and weak power networks. These are based on whether actors can be excluded from exchanges, as well as the presence of strong and weak actors. Network exchange theory thus can predict the distribution of resources across the network, depending on the strength of the network and the strength of the actors who make up that network. Considerations such as these provide one of the greatest benefits of combining network and exchange theory: an expanded notion of agency that takes into account power differentials between actors.

Rational Choice Theory

In sociology, the main proponent of rational choice theory has been James Coleman (1931-1995). Because of Coleman's focus on social theory as an agent of social change, he believes that the appropriate level for social analysis is at the micro, agent level. Coleman believes that individuals act purposively towards their desired goals, usually acting to maximize their utility, with their goals and utilities shaped by values or preferences. Although he admits that actors are not always rational, he feels his predictions would be the same regardless of their rationality.

While Coleman focuses on the micro-to-macro link, the movement from individual-level behavior to the behavior of a system, he was also concerned with the macro-to-micro connection, or the ways in which structures shape behavior, and the micro-to-micro link, or how the behavior of individuals affects the behavior of other individuals. Three weaknesses in this approach are apparent: (1) it privileges the micro-to-macro issue, and thus does not pay enough attention to the other linkages; (2) it ignores the macro-to-macro issue; and (3) the causal arrows flow in only one direction, thus underestimating both feedback within relationships and the dialectical relationships

between levels.

Coleman attempts to build from micro-level action into macro-level phenomena, but doing so in a way in which the conception of the actor remains constant across various macro-level phenomena. Coleman sees the granting of authority and rights from one individual to another as a basic building block in macro-level phenomena. This subordination creates a "structure" rather than just two interacting individuals, thus allowing for the possibility that individuals might maximize the interests of others, or of a group. Coleman uses a similar perspective in trying to explain more chaotic macro-level phenomena, which result from the unilateral transfer of control of an individual's action from one individual to another. Because the transfer is unilateral, the careful balancing act between individuals does not occur, and a stable system equilibrium does not emerge.

Other systems are stable because norms develop. For Coleman, norms are created when individuals give up control over their own behavior but gain some control over others in the form of the rules governing behavior. Thus, these individuals see some purpose in regulating behavior in some way. Coleman believed that norms were effective only to the extent that a consensus existed that some individuals have the right to control the behavior of others and that a mechanism existed to enforce the

consensus. Norms, then, are macro-level phenomena that emerge from purposive micro-level interactions.

Coleman distinguishes between individual actors, who wish to maximize their individual interests, and corporate actors, who act on the behalf of some group or collectivity. Within any collectivity, both may be acting simultaneously, leading to resistance to the authority of the collectivity. Because of the importance of collectivities to modern life, Coleman sees a shift from primordial structures, such as families, towards corporate structures, understanding that the ramifications of cross-purposes that exist between individual and corporate actors are crucial for rational choice theory.

Ultimately, Coleman wishes to move away from homo sociologicus, or a view of actors and action as structurally dependent, and towards homo economicus, a view of actors

who have the ability to act both in cooperation with, and despite of, structures.

Criticisms

Rational choice has faced a wide array of criticisms. For instance, critics argue that it: (1) neglects to specify causal mechanisms; (2) promotes an inadequate psychological reductionism; and (3) advocates a perspective that leads only to blind alleys. Some have reacted to the hubris of rational choicers (who have voiced a desire to replace other forms of theory), given that much of it is anathema from their perspective. Rational choice has also been criticized for ignoring culture and for decomposing into incoherence and tautology.

Contemporary Feminist Theory Chapter 13 Chapter Summary

Contemporary Feminist Theory: Theoretical Orientation

Feminist theory is distinct from other theoretical perspectives in that it is woman-centered and interdisciplinary, and it actively promotes ways to achieve social justice. Three core questions inform feminist theory: (1) "What about the women?" (2) "Why is the social world as it is?" and (3) "How can we change and improve the social world so as to make it a more just place for women and for all people?"

Feminist theorists have also started to question the differences between women, including how race, class, ethnicity, and age intersect with gender. In sum, feminist theory is most concerned with giving a voice to women and highlighting the various ways women have contributed to society.

The Historical Roots of Feminist Theory

Historically, feminist activity has paralleled liberation events, including the American and French Revolutions, the abolitionist movement in the 1830s, the mobilization for suffrage

in the early 1900s, and the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s. These historical movements of feminism are referred to as waves. First-wave feminism-including the first women's rights convention, which was held in Seneca Falls, NY, in 1848, and the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote in 1920-is characterized by women's struggle for political rights. Second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s and the third-wave feminism of today emphasize a variety of issues, including the growth of feminist organizations and publications and the increasing numbers of feminists in

government, the educational system, and other professions.

Varieties of Contemporary Feminist Theory

Four varieties of feminist theory attempt to answer the question "What about the women?" The gender difference perspective tries to answer this question by examining how women's location in, and experience of, social situations differ from men's. Cultural feminists look to

the different values associated with womanhood and femininity (e.g., caring, cooperation, and pacifism) as a reason why men and women experience the social world differently. Other feminist theorists believe that the different roles assigned to women and men within institutions better explain gender difference, including the sexual division of labor in the household. Existential and phenomenological feminists focus on how women have been marginalized and defined as the Other in patriarchal societies. Women are thus seen as

objects and are denied the opportunity for self-realization.

Gender-inequality theories look to answer the question "What about the women?" by recognizing that women's location in, and experience of, social situations are not only different but also unequal to men's. Liberal feminists argue that women have the same capacity as men for moral reasoning and agency, but that patriarchy, particularly the sexist patterning of the division of labor, has historically denied women the opportunity to express and practice this reasoning. Women have been isolated to the private sphere of the household and, thus, left without a voice in the public sphere. Even after women enter the public sphere, they are still expected to manage the private sphere and take care of household duties and child rearing. Liberal feminists point out that marriage is a site of

gender inequality and that women do not benefit from being married as men do. Indeed, married women have higher levels of stress than unmarried women and married men. According to liberal feminists, the sexual division of labor in both the public and private spheres needs to be altered in order for women to achieve equality.

Theories of gender oppression go further than theories of gender difference and gender inequality by arguing that not only are women different from or unequal to men, but that

they are actively oppressed, subordinated, and even abused by men. Power is the key variable in the two main theories of gender oppression: psychoanalytic feminism and radical feminism. Psychoanalytic feminists attempt to explain power relations between men and women by reformulating Freud's theories of the subconscious and unconscious, human emotions, and childhood development. They feel that conscious calculation cannot fully explain the production and reproduction of patriarchy. For example,

the unconscious fear that men have towards their own mortality may account for why men are driven to control women. Radical feminists argue that being a woman is a positive thing in and of itself, but that this is not acknowledged in patriarchal societies where women are oppressed. They identify physical violence as being at the base of patriarchy, but they think that patriarchy can be defeated if women come recognize their own value and strength, establish a sisterhood of trust with other women, confront oppression critically, and form female separatist networks in the private and public spheres.

Structural oppression theories posit that women's oppression and inequality are a result of capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. Socialist feminism combines Marxian class analysis with feminist social protest in an attempt to answer the question "What about the women?" They agree with Marx and Engels that the working class is exploited as a consequence of the capitalist mode of production, but they seek to extend this exploitation not just to class but also to gender. Intersectionality theorists seek to explain oppression and inequality across a variety of variables, including class, gender, race, ethnicity, and age. They make the important insight that not all women experience oppression in the same way. White women and black women, for example, face different forms of discrimination in the workplace. Thus, different groups of women come to view the world through a shared standpoint of "heterogeneous commonality."

Feminism and Postmodernism

During the 1990s some feminists began to incorporate postmodern ideas and vocabulary into their theoretical work. The oppositional epistemology of postmodernism complemented feminism, particularly in questioning the relation of power to knowledge. However, feministtheorists are cautious of the postmodern turn in social theory for several reasons. They view postmodernism as too removed from political struggles. Postmodernism may lead people away from collective action and towards a radical individualism. Furthermore,

feminists argue that postmodernism is too divorced from material reality - its focus on discourse, representation, and texts ignores material inequality, injustice, and oppression.

Towards a Feminist Sociological Theory

Feminist sociological theory combines the various types of feminism discussed thus far to focus on five major areas: the sociology of knowledge, the macro-social order, the micro-social order, subjectivity, and theory integration. A feminist sociology of knowledge emphasizes standpoint theory and intersectionality theory in relation to knowledge production and power relations. Feminist sociologists who study the macro-social order seek to expand Marx's analysis of economic production to social production more generally, including the household, the state, religion, and sexuality. One main topic of concern for these theorists is the production and reproduction of gender ideology. Feminist sociologists who study the micro-social order emphasize the role of gender in everyday interactions and the different meanings that men and women have regarding specific situations. Subjectivity occupies a special place in feminist sociological theory as it seeks to understand how women are socialized to see themselves through the eyes of men. When women learn to internalize the generalized other, or the perspective of society, it is a

male-centered other that they must relate to. In other words, women, like other subordinate groups in society, develop a bifurcated consciousness where they live with both the reality of actual experience and the reality of social typifications. Other feminist theorists question the reasons why a male-dominated sociology has categorized and divided the world into micro or macro. Feminist sociologists seek to integrate macro- and micro-level social phenomena. For example,Dorothy E. Smith (1926- ) discusses

"relations of ruling," "generalized, anonymous, impersonal texts," and "local actualities of lived experiences."

Micro-Macro Integration

Chapter 14 Chapter Summary

Beginning in the 1980s there was renewed interest in the micro-macro linkage. Despite the early integrationist tendencies of the classical theorists, much of 20th-century theory was either micro-extremist or macro-extremist in its orientation. On the macro side are theories such as structural functionalism, some variants of neo-Marxian theory, and conflict theory. Conversely, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, exchange and rational-choice theory are all examples of micro-extremism. Thus micro- and macro- extremism can be seen as a development in modern theory, and indeed, many

of the classical theorists can be understood as having an interest in the micro-macro linkage. A renewed interest in micro-macro integration arose in the 1980s.

There are two strands of work on micro-macro integration. The first involves attempting to integrate various micro and macro theories, such as combining structural functionalism and symbolic interactionism. The second involves creating theory that effectively combines the two levels of analysis. This chapter focuses primarily on the

latter.

Integrated Sociological Paradigm

George Ritzer has attempted to construct an Integrated Sociological Paradigm built upon two distinctions: between micro and macro levels, and between the objective and

subjective. This produces four dimensions: macro-objective, large-scale material phenomena such as bureaucracies; macro-subjective, large-scale ideational or nonmaterial phenomena such as norms; micro-objective, small-scale material phenomena such as patterns of behavior; and micro-subjective, small-scale ideational or nonmaterial phenomena such as psychological states or the cognitive processes involved in "constructing" reality. These are not conceptualized as dichotomies, but rather as continuums. Ritzer argues that these dimensions cannot be analyzed

separately, and thus the dimensions are dialectically related, with no particular dimension necessarily privileged over any other.

Ritzer has utilized this integrated approach to look at the consequences of the rise in consumer debt in Expressing America: A Critique of the Global Credit Card Society. He attempts to integrate micro and macro by focusing on the micro-level personal troubles it creates, as well as the macro-level public issues involved. Personal troubles are those

problems that affect an individual and those immediately around him or her. In the case of credit cards, individuals are accumulating large amounts of debt, resulting in prolonged periods of financial trouble. Public issues tend to be those that affect large numbers of people. Credit cards create public issues because of the large number of people indebted to credit card companies, which have given rise to bankruptcies and delinquencies. Ritzer demonstrates the dialectical relationship between the personal troubles and public issues created by policies and procedures of credit card firms, such

as deluging the populace with pre-approved cards, as well as targeting minors for credit cards.

Multidimensional Sociology

Jeffrey Alexander has used an integrative approach that very much resembles Ritzer's. Though the dimensions along which he differentiates the levels of social phenomena differ, they mirror the distinctions created by Ritzer: rather than micro-macro, Alexander uses problems of order, which can be either individual or collective. Rather than subjective-objective, Alexander uses problems of action, which range from materialist (instrumental, rational) to idealist (normative, affective). Despite this similarity in analytical approaches, Alexander and Ritzer differ in the strategy used to integrate the various levels of analysis. Unlike Ritzer, Alexander privileges the macro over the micro. Alexander sees micro-level theory as unable to adequately deal with the unique nature of collective phenomena and unable to adequately handle macro-level phenomena generally. More specifically, Alexander's sympathies lay with collective/normative-level-oriented theory. Only this form of theory can sufficiently deal with macro-level phenomena while remaining coherent and without constructing

structural dopes that act at the whim of macro-objective level phenomena.

Micro-to-Macro Model

James Coleman (1926-1995) has attempted to apply micro-level rational-choice theory to macro-level phenomena. As an overall integrative approach this is

unsatisfactory as it provides insufficient insight into the macro-micro connection. Using Max Weber's (1864-1920) Protestant Ethic thesis, Coleman built a model explicating his integrative model. To Coleman, these various levels of analysis were related causally, and thus did not take into account feedback among the various levels. Allen Liska has tried to improve upon this model by giving more attention to the macro-to-micro linkage and to relationships among macro-level phenomena, though the relationships are still causal. Liska also argues for the increased use of a

particular way of describing macro phenomena, aggregation. Unlike structural and global explanations, which rely on poorly understood processes such as emergence, the meaning of aggregation is easily elaborated.

Micro Foundations of Macrosociology

Randall Collins's integrative approach, which he calls radical microsociology, focuses on interaction ritual chains, that, when linked together, produce large scale, macro-level phenomena. Hoping to centralize the role of human action and interaction in theory, Collins rejects the idea that macro-level phenomena can act, instead focusing on the premise that, ultimately, someone, an individual, must do something in order for action to occur.

Back to the Future: Norbert Elias's Figurational Sociology

One European of note, Norbert Elias (1897-1990), has contributed significantly to an integrative sociology. Elias developed the notion of figuration to avoid analytically dichotomizing levels of analysis. Figurations are social processes that interweave people in relationships, creating interrelationships. Figurations are not static, coercive macro-structures, but rather are conceptualized as relatively fluid processes of inter-

relationships among individuals that create shifting relations of power and

interdependence. Elias makes relationships between people central, particularly relations of interdependence, in contradistinction to individualistic and atomistic approaches.

The History of Manners

Elias demonstrates his integrative approach in his best-known work, The Civilizing Process, which has two volumes, The History of Manners and Power and Civility. This work deals with the expansion of civility, or manners, across society. More abstractly, it relates changes in the structure of society to changes in the structure of behavior. The History of Manners deals primarily with the diffusion of manners (micro), while Power and Civility deals primarily with the changes in society that brought rise to the diffusion of manners (macro). Central to Elias's work are the changing levels of interdependence among people. This was the result of increases in differentiation in society from competition. Increased differentiation leads to increased interdependence, which in turn leads to an increase in consideration for other people. This has a number of effects: a transformation of control, from being relatively little and external, to an interiorization of control by individuals, who self-police. It also creates what Elias calls a shifting

frontier of embarrassment created by a lack of self-control over impulses, and thus changes in manners. These changes were diffused throughout society by the creation of certain types of figurations. According to Elias, these figurations made it possible for a king to emerge, and it was in the king's court, populated by nobles, from which the habits and rules of the day emanated. Because nobles had long dependency chains, Elias believed they needed to be particularly sensitive to others. The king's increasing

power, particularly through taxation and the monopolization of the means of violence, also encouraged sensitivity among nobles. Thus the civilizing process is tied to the "reorganization of the social fabric" through competition and interdependence. These macro level changes made possible a set of relationships that produced wide-scale changes in micro-level patterns of behavior throughout society, beginning in the king's court with his nobles.

Agency-Structure Integration

Chapter 15 Chapter Summary

The agency-structure perspective is the European alternative to the micro-macro perspective in America. Agency generally refers to micro-level, individual human actors, but it can also refer to collectivities of that act. Structure usually refers to large-scale social structures, but it can also refer to micro structures, such as those involved in human interaction.

Structuration Theory

Structuration theory focuses on the mutual constitution of structure and agency. Anthony Giddens (1938- ) argues that structure and agency are a duality that cannot be conceived of apart from one another. Human practices are recursive-that is, through their activities, individuals create both their consciousness and the

structural conditions that make their activities possible. Because social actors are reflexive and monitor the ongoing flow of activities and structural conditions, they adapt their actions to their evolving understandings. As a result, social scientific knowledge of society will actually change human activities. Giddens calls this dialectical relationship between social scientific knowledge and human practices the double hermeneutic.

Actors continually develop routines that give them a sense of security and that enable them to deal efficiently with their social lives. While their motives provide the overall plan of action, it is these routine practices that determine what shape the action will take. Giddens emphasizes that actors have power to shape their own actions but that the consequences of actions are often unintended. Structure is the rules and resources that give similar social practices a systemic form. Only through the activities of human actors can structure exist. While Giddens acknowledges that structure can be constraining to actors, he thinks that sociologists have exaggerated the importance of structural constraints. Structures can also enable actors to do things they would not otherwise be able to do. For Giddens, a social system is a set of reproduced social practices and relations between actors.

The concept of structuration underscores the duality of structure and agency. There can

be no agency without structures that shape motives into practices, but there can be no structures independent of the routine practices that create them.

Culture and Agency

Margaret Archer (1943- ) has criticized the concept of structuration as analytically insufficient. She thinks it is useful for social scientists to understand structure and

agency asindependent, because it makes it possible to analyze the interrelations between the two sides. Archer also thinks that Giddens gives short shrift to the relative autonomy of culture from both structure and agency.

Archer's focus is on morphogenesis, the process by which complex interchanges lead not only to changes in the structure of the system but also to an end product-structural elaboration. The theory emphasizes that there are emergent properties of social interaction that are separable from the actions and interactions that produce them. Once these structures have emerged, they react upon and alter action and interaction.

Archer reserves the term "structure" for material phenomena and interests. Morphogenetic theory focuses on how structural conditioning affects social interaction and how this interaction, in turn, leads to structural elaboration. Archer sees culture-nonmaterial phenomena and ideas-as autonomous from structure. In the cultural domain, morphogenetic theory focuses on how cultural conditioning affects socio-cultural interaction and how this interaction leads to cultural elaboration. Compared to structure and agency, Archer asserts that the nexus between culture and agency has been neglected. She suggests that in order to understand agency, one must

understand the context of innumerable interrelated theories, beliefs, and ideas that have had an influence over it. Agents have the ability either to reinforce or resist the influence of the cultural system.

Habitus and Field

Another major approach to the agency-structure linkage is Pierre Bourdieu's (1930-2002) theory of habitus and field. Bourdieu sought to bridge subjectivism (the individual) and objectivism (society) with a perspective called constructiviststructuralism. Structuralism focuses on the objective structures of language and culture that give shape to human action. Constructivism looks at the social genesis of schemes of perception, thought, and action. Bourdieu wants to examine the social construction of objective structures with an emphasis on how people

perceive and construct their own social world, but without neglecting how perception and construction are constrained by structures. An important dynamic in this relationship is the ability of individual actors to invent and improvise within the structure of their routines.

The habitus is the mental structure through which people deal with the social world. It can be thought of as a set of internalized schemes through which the world is

perceived, understood, appreciated, and evaluated. A habitus is acquired as the result of the long-term occupation of a position in the social world. Depending on the position occupied, people will have a different habitus. The habitus operates as a structure, but people do not simply respond to it mechanically. When people change positions, sometimes their habitus is no longer appropriate, a condition called hysteresis. Bourdieu argues that the habitus both produces and is produced by the social world. People internalize external structures, and they externalize things they have internalized through practices.

The concept of field is the objective complement to the idea of habitus. A field is a network of social relations among the objective positions within it. It is not a set of interactions or intersubjective ties among individuals. The social world has a great variety of semi-autonomous fields, such as art, religion, and higher education. The field

is a type of competitive marketplace in which economic, cultural, social, and symbolic

power are used. The preeminent field is the field of politics, from which a hierarchy of power relationships serves to structure all other fields. To analyze a field, one must first understand its relationship to the political field. The next step is to map the objective positions within a field and, finally, the nature of the habitus of the agents who occupy

particular positions can be understood. These agents act strategically, depending on their habitus, in order to enhance their capital. Bourdieu is particularly concerned with how powerful positions within a field can perpetrate symbolic violence on less powerful actors. Cultural mechanisms such as education impose a dominant perspective on the rest of the population in order to legitimate their power.

Bourdieu's analysis of the aesthetic preferences of different groups can be found

inDistinction. The cultural preferences of the various groups within society constitute coherent systems that serve to unify those with similar tastes and differentiate them from others with divergent tastes. Through the practical application of preferences, people classify objects and, in the process, classify themselves. Bourdieu thinks the field of taste involves the intersection of social-class relationships and cultural relationships. He argues that taste represents an opportunity to both experience and assert one's position in the class hierarchy. These tastes are engendered in the deep-rooted dispositions of the habitus. Changes in tastes result from struggles for dominance within both cultural and social-class fields as different factions struggle to define high culture and taste.

Bourdieu also applies his concepts to French academia in Homo Academicus. This work is concerned with the relationship between the objective positions of different academic

fields, their corresponding habitus, and the struggle between them. Bourdieu also wants to link the academic field to a larger field of power. He finds that French academia is divided into dominant fields of law and medicine and lesser fields of science and the arts. He suggests that faculty members within each field use their social and cultural capital to compete for esteem. As a result, aspiring academics attach themselves to established professors who control their intellectual production. Bourdieu is critical of this system because it encourages conformity rather than innovation.

Colonization of the Life-World

Jurgen Habermas's (1929- ) theory of the colonization of the life-world can be characterized as an agency-structure issue because his ideas draw on both action theory and systems theory. The main premise of Habermas's theory is that the free and open communication of the life-world is being impinged on by the formal rationality of

the system. The colonization of the life-world involves a restatement of the Weberian thesis that, in the modern world, formal rationality is triumphing over substantive rationality.

The life-world is an internal perspective on society conceived from the perspective of the acting subject. Drawing on phenomenology and symbolic interactionism, Habermas asserts that when communicative action takes place in the life-world, it involves a range of unspoken presuppositions and mutual understandings that must be present for it to take place. He thinks that free and open communication in the life-world, with the force of the best argument winning the day, is our best chance at achieving substantive rational solutions to collective dilemmas.

While the life-world represents the viewpoint of the acting subject in society, the

system involves an external perspective that views society from the observer's

perspective. The analysis of systems is attuned to the interconnections of actions and their functional significance. The system includes structures such as the family, the judiciary, the state, and the economy. As these structures evolve, they become more distanced from the life-world, progressively differentiated, and increasingly complex.

But they also gain greater capacity to steer the life-world by exerting external control over communicative action.

Habermas asserts that the fundamental problem for social theory is how to connect these two conceptual strategies. On the one hand, a social integration strategy focuses on the way in which the life-world is integrated through communicatively achieved and normatively guaranteed consensus. On the other hand, a system-integration strategy

focuses on the external control exercised over individual decisions that are not subjectively coordinated. Habermas concludes that each of these two strategies has serious limitations. The social integration strategy has a limited ability to comprehend the reproductive processes at the system level, while the systems-integration perspective cannot understand the normative patterns that govern the internal perspectives of the life-world.

Habermas argues that the both the system and the life-world are becoming increasingly rationalized. The rationalization of the life-world involves growth in the rationality of communicative action. Social integration is increasingly achieved through the process of consensus formation. The rationalization of the system involves the coordination of activities by monetarization and bureaucratization. Habermas believes that these instrumental system imperatives threaten substantive rationality by impinging on the

life-world and restricting communication.

Agency-Structure and Micro-Macro Linkages

One of the key differences between micro-macro and agency-structure theory is their respective images of the actor. Micro-macro theory tends to have a behaviorist orientation, whereas agency-structure theory places an emphasis on conscious,

creative action. A second major difference is that micro-macro theory tends to depict issues in static, hierarchical, and ahistorical terms, whereas agency-structure theory is more firmly embedded in a historical, dynamic framework.

Contemporary Theories of Modernity Chapter 16 Chapter Summary

Most classical sociologists were engaged in an analysis and critique of modern society. For Marx, modernity was defined by the capitalist economy. To Weber, the defining problem of the modern world was the expansion of formal rationality at the expense of the other types of rationality. In Durkheim's view, organic solidarity and the weakening of the collective consciousness defined modernity. Simmel, while sometimes seen as a postmodernist, investigated modernity in the city and in the money economy.

The Juggernaut of Modernity

Anthony Giddens (1938- ) has described the modern world as a juggernaut, that is, as an engine of enormous power which can be directed to some extent, but which also threatens to run out of control. The juggernaut is a runaway world with great increases over prior systems in the pace, scope, and profoundness of change.

Giddens defines modernity in terms of four basic institutions. Capitalism is characterized by commodity production, private ownership of capital, wage labor, and a class system derived from these characteristics. Industrialism involves the use of inanimate power sources and machinery to produce goods, but it also affects transportation, communication, and everyday life. Surveillance refers to the supervision

of the activities of subject populations in the political sphere. The fourth characteristic is control of the means of violence by the state.

Modernity is given dynamism by three processes. Time and space distanciation refers to the tendency for modern relationships to be increasingly distant. Relatedly, disembedding involves the lifting out of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space. In such a system, trust becomes necessary because we no longer have full information about social phenomena. Finally, reflexivity means that the social practices of modern society are constantly reexamined and reformed in the light of incoming information.

Giddens thinks that modernity has created a distinctive risk profile. Risk becomes global in intensity and in the expansion of contingent events that affect large numbers of people around the world. Our awareness of these risks gives us the sense of insecurity implied in the term juggernaut.

Giddens argues that the reflexivity of modernity extends to the core of the self and becomes a reflexive project of identity formation. For example, the body is subject to a variety of regimes that help individuals mold their bodies. He also argues that intimate relationships have been set apart from the routines of ordinary life (sequestered). As a result, the reflexive effort to create a pure intimate relationship is usually separate

from larger moral issues.

The Risk Society

According to Ulrich Beck (1944- ), we no longer live in an industrial society and are moving toward a risk society. Risk society is a form of reflexive modernity in which the central issue is how risks can be prevented, minimized, or channeled. These risks are being produced by the sources of wealth in modern society. Industry, for example, produces a wide range of hazardous consequences that reach across time and space. Beck also argues that science has become a protector of a global contamination of people and nature. He suggests that subgroups, such as large companies, are more likely than the governments to lead the way when coping with risks.

McDonaldization and the New Means of Consumption

There are four dimensions of formal rationality. Efficiency means the search for the best means to the end. Predictability means a world of no surprises. Rational systems

tend to emphasize quantity, usually large quantities, rather than quality. Finally, formal rationality relies on non-human technology rather than human qualities. Formally rational systems have a variety of irrational consequences, such as dehumanization and demystification.

Ritzer argues that the fast-food restaurant brings formal rationality to new heights. He argues that the prevalence of McDonaldization indicates that we still live in a modern

world. Ritzer has also observed the rise of new means of consumption, such as shopping malls and superstores, since the end of World War II. He defines the means of consumption as entities that make it possible for people to acquire goods and services and for the same people to be controlled and exploited as consumers. The new means of consumption are modern because they are highly rationalized.

Modernity and the Holocaust

Zygmunt Bauman (1925-) considers the Holocaust to be the paradigm of modern bureaucratic rationality. The perpetrators of the Holocaust employed rationality as one of their major tools. Bauman suggests that the Holocaust was the product of modernity, not a result of a breakdown of modernity. Without modernity and rationality, the Holocaust would be unthinkable. Mass extermination required a highly rationalized and bureaucratized operation. Bauman suggests that bureaucracies, while not inherently cruel, are likely to be used for inhuman purposes. There is continuity between the rationality employed in the Holocaust and the rationalization of the fast-food industry today. Bauman believes that the conditions that created the Holocaust have not really changed and that only strong morality and pluralistic political forces can prevent a recurrence.

Modernity's Unfinished Project

Jurgen Habermas (1929-) believes that social systems have grown increasingly complex, differentiated, integrated, and characterized by instrumental reason. At the same time the life-world has witnessed increasing differentiation and condensation, secularization, and the institutionalization of norms of reflexivity and criticism. A rational society would be one in which both the system and the life-world were

permitted to rationalize following their own logics. However, in the modern world, the system has come to dominate the life-world. While we may be enjoying the fruits of system rationalization, we are deprived of the enrichment of life that comes from a life-world allowed to flourish. Habermas thinks that solutions to many of the problems in

the modern world could be devised if the life-world had a better ability to steer the system. Habermas is critical of the postmodernists for rejecting modernity.

Informationalism and the Network Society

Manuel Castells (1942-) examines the emergence of a new society, culture, and economy in the light of the revolution in information technology. This revolution has led to a fundamental restructuring of the capitalist system. The spread of informational capitalism has led to the emergence of oppositional social movements based on self and identity. Accompanying the rise of the new global information economy is the emergence of a new organizational form called the network enterprise, which is characterized by flexible production, new management systems, organizations based on a horizontal rather than a vertical model, and the intertwining of large corporations in strategic alliances. As a result, the nature of work is being transformed.

Castells asserts that the larger society is being reorganized into networks that are capable of unlimited expansion and able to innovate without disrupting the system. Castells suggests that individuals and collectivities whose identities are threatened by this new order actively oppose this new network society. Castells also believes that the rise of the network society means that the state is losing power vis-à-vis global capital markets.

Globalization

Globalization can be analyzed culturally, economically, politically, and institutionally. In each case, a key difference is whether one sees increasing homogeneity or heterogeneity on the world scene. At the extremes, the globalization of culture can be seen as the diffusion of common codes and practices or as a process in which cultural inputs interact to create hybrid blends. Theorists who focus on economic factors tend to emphasize the homogenizing effect of the expanding market economy. Some political/institutional thinkers focus on the worldwide spread of standard models of governance, while others suggest that local social structures make more of a difference in people's lives than ever.

Douglas Kellner (1943-) states that the key to understanding globalization is theorizing it as, at once, a product of technological revolution and the global restructuring of capital. While the capitalistic economy remains central to understanding globalization, technoscience provides its infrastructure.

Giddens emphasizes the role of the West and the United States in globalization. He

recognizes that globalization has both undermined local cultures and served to revive them. He also suggests that a clash is taking place today between fundamentalism and cosmopolitanism.

Beck defines globalism as the view that the world is dominated by economics and that we are witnessing the emergence of the hegemony of the capitalist world market and the neo-liberal ideology that underpins it. Beck is critical of this conception as being

oversimplified and linear. Beck sees greater merit in the idea of globality, in which

closed spaces like nation-states are becoming increasingly illusory because of the growing influence of transnational actors. Beck refers to the rise of globality as a second modernity characterized by denationalization.

Bauman sees mobility as the most powerful aspect of globalization. He argues that the winners in the "space war" are those who are able to move freely around the globe. The losers not only lack mobility but are also confined to territories denuded of meaning.

Ritzer argues that there is an elective affinity between globalization and nothing. He defines "nothing" as centrally conceived and controlled forms devoid of most distinctive content. It is easier to export empty forms throughout the globe than it is to export forms that are loaded with content. We are witnessing the global proliferation of generic, dehumanized, and disenchanted forms.

Arjun Appadurai discusses global flows and the disjunctures among them. He uses the suffix -scape to connote the idea that these processes have fluid, irregular, variable

shapes. For example, ethnoscapes are mobile groups and individuals that play an important role in shifting the world. He also describes technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes.

Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and the Emergence

of Postmodern Social Theory

Chapter 17 Chapter Summary

The concept of modern social theory presents the possibility of a postmodern social theory. Indeed, postmodernism has had wide-ranging effects on a number of disciplines, including sociology. Because of the multidisciplinary nature of postmodernism, it is necessary to think of postmodern social theory rather than postmodern sociological theory, with the basic distinction resting on the various sources of input in social theory.

Structuralism

Structuralism emerged from a reaction against the humanism of Jean-Paul Sartre's (1905-1980) existentialism. Sartre assailed the idea of structures that overly determine the behavior of individuals, of having actors without agency. Structuralism emerged in the 1960s, and was based on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure(1857-1913). Saussure's work was oriented to understanding the structures underlying languages. Thus, structuralism is associated with the linguistic turn. Saussure focused on the relationship between the formal, grammatical system of language (langue) and the everyday usage of language (parole). Parole was of little interest to linguists, who should be concerned with understanding the determinant laws that

govern langue. Langue is conceptualized as a system of signs whereby each sign may be understood by its relationships to other signs within the system. This system of signs is a structure, a structure that affects society by shaping relationships of signs within the system and our understanding of the world. Saussure focused on the creation of difference, particularly through binary oppositions (e.g., hot/cold) , which have meaning only in relation to one another. The idea of semiotics extended the analysis of sign systems to various dimensions of the social world.

Structuralism also influenced anthropology and Marxism. In the former case, the work ofClaude Levi-Strauss (1908-) exhibits this influence. Levi-Strauss attempted to extend structuralism to anthropology, focusing on communication. He reinterpreted social phenomena for their effects on communication. Structural Marxism took from structuralism an interest in the historical origins of structures, but continued to focus

on social and economic structures.

Poststructuralism

Poststructuralism loosened the moorings underlying systems of signs. Rather than seeing stable relationships of signs, they saw chaotic and highly variable context-dependent systems. In their view, such structures could not have the coercive power

over individuals that the structuralists attributed to them. Jacques Derrida(1930-), perhaps the originator of poststructuralism, has argued against the notion of logocentrism. By logocentrism Derrida meant the coercive, limiting effects of the search for universal systems of thought that would reveal "truth." Instead, Derrida attempts to

deconstruct, or uncover, hidden differences that underlie logocentrism. At the heart of the notion of logocentrism is the silencing of voices by intellectual elites in the creation of the dominant discourse. Derrida argues for a decentering, so that previously excluded or silenced voices may contribute. While the ultimate result of this is unclear, Derrida privileges a movement away from any sort of silencing, a movement away from the fallacy of universal truth, and movement towards a society characterized by participation, play, and difference.

Michel Foucault

Perhaps the most recognizable figure associated with poststructuralism is Michel Foucault(1937-1984). Foucault incorporated a variety of theoretical insights, particularly from Karl Marx(1818-1883), Max Weber(1864-1920), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Like Nietzsche, he was particularly interested in the

relationship between power and knowledge.

Foucault's early work focused on the structures that underlie the limits of discourse and the ways in which discourses create "truth." Thus, much of Foucault's work focuses on discourses related to the creation of the human sciences, such as psychology. Foucault's work during this period ranged from investigating medical discourses and the construction of normative understanding of people (normal versus pathological) and ultimately into the problematic surrounding the emergence of people as both subject and object of knowledge.

In addition, Foucault's later, less structuralist work sought to create a genealogy of power, a type of historical analysis that does not seek invariable laws of social change, but rather recognizes the contingency of history. Substantively, Foucault's genealogy

questioned the ways in which knowledge and power interpenetrate in certain types of practices, such as the regulation of the body, governing bodies, and the formation of the self. Thus, it asks how people govern themselves and others through the production of knowledge. Foucault pays particular attention to the techniques that are developed from knowledge and to how they are used to control people. For Foucault, history is punctuated with changing forms of domination.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault reinterprets the transformation of crime and punishment, shifting the explanation away from humanistic concerns and towards the need to rationalize the functions of discipline and punishment. Foucault attempts to highlight the multivalent, multidimensional nature of this transformation by acknowledging the relationship between the new techniques of punishment and discipline with the encroachment of power throughout society. These "micro-physics of power" were based on hierarchical observation, normalizing judgments, and examination, and they were originally taken from the military. These find their ultimate expression in the Panopticon, a structure designed by Jeremy Bentham(1748-1832) for observing criminals. The characteristics of the panopticon are important, because it allows for the shift in regulatory power to the individual, as they now self-monitor their behavior. Foucault is also interested in the relationship between sex and power. Here again he reinterprets history to show the ways in which medicine is more

concerned with morality than with sexuality.

Actor-Network Theory

Actor-network theory extends semotics to focus on material objects rather than just symbols. Actor-network theory sees sign as emerging from the context in which entities are located. Actor-network theory attempts to understand action, less from the perspective of the actor, but rather in terms of its location within a network and its relationship to non-material objects. From this perspective, non-material objects are capable of action (as actants), although objects are considered inferior partners to humans. The interactions of these components are viewed not as consistent and patternable networks, but rather as a fluid combination of interactions at various levels of social life that are performed by actors and actants. Actor-network theory breaks down many analytical distinctions used in other social theories, such as micro/macro and agency/structure, to help make sense of social phenomena.

Postmodern Social Theory

Postmodern social theory has received a tremendous level of attention and has diversified to such an extent that it is difficult to make easy, overarching generalizations, particularly since there are substantial points of disagreements between various postmodern thinkers. Indeed, it is still debated whether postmodernism represents a distinct phase in history or a new society of sorts, or whether it simply extends modernism. Still another perspective sees modernism and

postmodernism less as competing periods of history and more as sets of principles that critically engage one another.

In order to better engage the variants of this discipline, it is useful to distinguish between postmodernity, postmodernism, and postmodern social theory. Postmodernity refers to that which comes after modernity, conceptualized as another epoch of history. Postmodernismrefers to cultural products, while postmodern social theory refers to a way of questioning the world different from modern social theory. Understood in this way, the postmodern represents a new historical epoch, new cultural products, and a new type of theorizing the social world, one that emerged from the acknowledgment of modernity's failures sometime between the Kennedy/Johnson administrations and the Reagan administration. Postmodern social theory rejects the ambitions and techniques of modern social theory, moving away from grand narratives and universalistic, rational theorizing and towards a deconstruction of universal truths,

a decentering that is attuned to difference and locality.

Moderate Postmodern Social Theory: Frederic Jameson

Frederic Jameson sees postmodernism as an extension of modernity. In his view, capitalism still dominates social life. Jameson makes the claim that while there have

been significant cultural changes, these are still the expression of the same sort of economic structures discussed by Karl Marx. Thus, despite attempts by the postmodern social theorists to use Marx as an archetype of modernist grand narratives, Jameson uses Marx's theory to help explain postmodernity. These cultural changes represent capitalism's expansion into the last uncommodified areas of life that is typical of "late capitalism." Late capitalism follows Marx's market capitalism and V. I. Lenin's (1870-1924) imperalist stage of capitalism. He also identifies cultures with specific economic

structures, such as postmodern culture in multinational capitalism.

Jameson characterizes postmodern society with four elements: (1) superficiality and lack of depth; (2) the waning of emotion or affect; (3) a loss of historicity; and (4) new technologies. A consequence of this is that people are unable to make sense of an increasingly complex society. He proposes the creation of cognitive maps to help us navigate the postmodern society, including its spatial dimensions. These maps bring about a certain form of consciousness (e.g., class consciousness) to help us understand our position within a complex system.

Extreme Postmodern Social Theory: Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard's work grew increasingly postmodern over his life, and although rooted in sociology, it can no longer be termed anything but postmodern. While his early work sought to synthesize Marx's work and semiotics, he came to view Marx as limited to the extent that his views replicated worldviews and an analytical orientation antithetical to change. Rather than replicating this, Baudrillard proposed the notion of

symbolic exchange, involving an uninterrupted cycle of gift giving, as an alternative.

Baudrillard sees modern society as dominated by media, information, technology, and their supporting structures. These create a code of production, leading to an explosion in signs. Signs are no longer attached to anything real, but rather are self-referential, imploding the relationship between signs and reality. Baudrillard also characterized the postmodern world by simulations and hyperreality. The former refers to the creation of

simulacra, which attempt to reproduce reality. The latter is a description of the social world in which simulations and simulacra are privileged, where they become real and predominate.

Unlike Marxists, Baudrillard saw little revolutionary activity on the part of workers or the masses; rather, he saw them as being increasingly passive. They are inundated with signs, simulacra, and hyperreality by a media willing to provide the masses with titillation. Thus, life is led toward nihilism and meaninglessness. Baudrillard promotes symbolic exchange as an alternative to the consumer culture of contemporary society. Despite this proposition, Baudrillard is not optimistic about the future.

Postmodern Social Theory and Sociological Theory

In many ways, postmodern thought is simply not commensurate with sociological theory. Its aversion to grand narratives refutes much of what sociology has been and tries to do. However, some authors have attempted to apply postmodern concepts to provide fruitful sociological analyses. George Ritzer's coupling of Weber and disenchantment in looking at the new means of consumption helps us understand the processes involved in re-enchantment, such as the use of simulations and implosion in Las Vegas.

Criticisms of Postmodern Social Theory

Postmodernism is criticized for being untestable, unsystematic, overly abstract, relativistic, pessimistic, and without vision. Nevertheless, there is some question as to what is the appropriate metric of success, as postmodernism has certainly posed a number of important and interesting questions to social theory.